All work starts with a free 48-hour diagnostic check. In addition to this we will agree a fixed price for all the work required before commencing. On top of this, you do not need to pay for most work we undertake if the recovery does fail. We serve Bolton and the local Greater Manchester area.
The distance from Bolton to our workshop is approximately 25 minutes by car and approximately 11 miles. The best option is often to simply drop items in personally, but they can be posted too if that is easier.
We cover Bolton along with the towns of Farnworth, Horwich and Westhoughton. Plus the wider Greater Manchester area.
Our location is approximately 11 miles south-east of Bolton via the A666 and M61. This would normally take you around 25 minutes to get here, depending on traffic. Many people find dropping their devices off on their way past is easier than posting.
Engineering and manufacturing survived in Bolton when textiles did not, as well as the university and a large retail and distribution sector. That gives us a unique mix of workplace technology, including shop floor PCs to run machine tools, accounts servers from family-run manufacturing businesses, and CCTV recorder units from trade counters and yard areas. Therefore a significant proportion of the jobs that come from Bolton are industrial-based, i.e., drives extracted from equipment which ran continually for years before people started thinking about backup systems.
These are drawn from the jobs that are sent to us, as opposed to being selected out of a capability list.
As mentioned above, the work we get from Bolton stems from its surviving manufacturing and engineering sectors, along with its university and large scale retail/distribution business. As such, the types of workloads we receive from this location will be quite different from those coming from other areas; therefore, they may also influence our pricing and speed of service.
As stated previously, a large portion of what comes from Bolton is industrial based as opposed to office based — drives removed from equipment that was running continuously prior to anyone even considering backing up.
We also receive standard household items that every area produces: a laptop that will not boot up; an external drive full of images you wanted to save; a memory card from your camera that has been erased accidentally. These can cost anything from £250 + VAT to £300 + VAT. They usually represent the fastest turn around time for recovery as well. From Bolton and the rest of Greater Manchester business and RAID data recovery start at £500 +VAT.
Regardless of whether the job is walked in or sent via a courier service, the steps are the same.
Please see below for delivery options and address. Insured postage from Bolton is acceptable if you cannot come in person. Please remove the hard drive or SSD from the device before sending the drive. Laptops, desktops etc., will not be accepted. Address: Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN, Monday – Friday, 09:00 am – 05:30 pm.
The fault type will be identified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — so the route, pricing and probability of recovery can be determined.
There is one price quoted prior to the job being worked on, which doesn’t change once accepted. If software would do the job, or no recovery is possible, then that will be communicated to you instead.
Your drive will be imaged read-only. A backup image will then be used to rebuild your data. This will be verified by checking files open rather than just by counting. Finally, your data will be shipped back to you in Bolton on fresh media with no extra charge for the return postage.
This costs us the job, but it's the right answer.
The drive still mounts and reads. Just copy your files off yourself — most important items first — then stop using it. Nothing a lab does to a readable drive you already own can add anything useful.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Check the version history in the cloud. Or Time Machine. Or Previous Versions. Or a copy someone emailed. Many enquiries are resolved in just five minutes, at no cost.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software, installed on a separate drive, will often do it for just a fraction of what we charge.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. It's almost always held by IT in Azure AD or Intune if it's on a company workstation. That one question has resolved more of these issues than anything else we have done technically.
Send the device in with an initial report of what has occurred to it. The diagnosis is at no charge and commits you to nothing, and the subsequent fee is written as a firm price prior to opening anything.
This is the only step that requires input from you and nothing else can happen until the device is on our bench. Package your item properly and include all the information we require about you and your item(s), then ship them to us. Then comes a no-cost diagnostic, followed by a written quote.
Posting it? Use a tracked and insured service. The value of what is on the drive far exceeds the cost of postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays from 9am to 5:30pm, and it still needs packing as described above for the journey.
Tell us about the item in question, tell us how it has been behaving lately, and let us know if there is anything you have done as far as troubleshooting goes so that our engineers may provide a realistic estimate of success and a probable cost range prior to sending your items off.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, we are located at Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. We’re about eleven miles away via the A666 and M61, approximately 25 minutes by car. Alternatively, you may wish to post the device insured, and it is returned to you postage paid in any case.
We can offer you the "band" that applies to you right now — our published prices begin at £250 + VAT for cards, and £300 + VAT for a single drive. Once we have finished the initial 48-hour no-charge diagnostic work, we will write to you with an accurate price quote which will not change thereafter.
Turn it off now and leave it off. Clicking means a head is unable to locate its servo data, and every subsequent power-up may potentially damage the platter surface. As such, how long it runs after the first noise is far more important to the result than anything we might do.
On a regular basis. For example, NDAs are always signed; you get one named contact from the beginning of each diagnostic project through to completion; invoices are sent instead of processing credit/debit card payments for established firms; and, as required by your insurance company or auditor, we document in writing exactly what happened when something went wrong.
From £250 + VAT for cards and USB media; from £300 + VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage; £550 + VAT flat rate for a Fusion Drive; and from £500 + VAT for RAID, NAS & servers — each quoted in writing after a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic.
Occasionally, when it's a logical fault on healthy hardware dropped in early; physical recovery cannot be compressed that far — handling priority will move you to the head of the queue, however you still cannot make a failing hard disk read at a faster speed.
Diagnostic work is free, there's no service fee in most cases unless the data has been recovered, and our office in Manchester is just 11 miles away from where you are instead of being at the far end of a courier chain. Either walk it in or ship it insured — they both begin the process in the same way.