Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Chester and the surrounding Cheshire area.
Roughly 26 minutes and 40 miles separate Chester from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Ellesmere Port, Northwich and Frodsham and the wider Cheshire area.
At forty miles this is toward the edge of what we cover in person, and most Chester work reaches us by insured courier — overnight, tracked, booked in the morning it lands. The distance affects logistics rather than the recovery.
Chester runs on financial and professional services around Chester Business Park, tourism and hospitality in the historic centre, and manufacturing at Ellesmere Port. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: financial services servers under real regulatory obligation, hospitality booking and till systems, and practice machines from the professional district. Financial services work here comes with compliance requirements as standard — DPAs, documented handling and UK-only processing are assumed rather than requested.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Chester runs on financial and professional services around Chester Business Park, tourism and hospitality in the historic centre, and manufacturing at Ellesmere Port, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is financial services servers under real regulatory obligation, hospitality booking and till systems, and practice machines from the professional district — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Financial services work here comes with compliance requirements as standard — DPAs, documented handling and UK-only processing are assumed rather than requested.
Alongside that there is the ordinary run of household work that every area produces: laptops that stopped starting, external drives full of photographs, camera cards formatted by mistake. Those are from £250 to £300 +VAT and are frequently the quickest jobs we handle. Business and array work from Chester and across Cheshire starts from £500 +VAT.
Written out, because “send it in and we’ll be in touch” is not much of an answer.
Your device is booked in the day it arrives and you are told it landed. Where the symptoms suggest mechanical damage it is examined before being powered at all — family, firmware revision and head configuration identified first, because powering a damaged drive to see what happens is how recoverable data stops being recoverable.
Within about 48 hours you get a written answer to four questions: what failed, whether the platters or flash are damaged, what proportion is realistically recoverable, and one fixed price. Nothing is chargeable until you have agreed that figure, and it does not move afterwards.
From approval, the device is imaged read-only and every reconstruction attempt runs against that copy, so nothing we try can reduce what is recoverable. Files are opened in their applications rather than counted, anything unreadable is named, and the recovered data goes back to Chester on fresh media with return shipping included.
Because a wasted trip helps nobody.
Phones and tablets. Not something we take on. Modern handsets are encrypted in a way that makes third-party recovery impractical, and if photographs are what matter the realistic route is iCloud, Google Photos or a backup rather than a laboratory.
Soldered Mac storage on a dead board. On T2 and Apple Silicon machines the flash is soldered and encrypted by the security chip. Once that board fails nobody recovers it — not us, not Apple, not anyone quoting four figures for board-level extraction.
Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and hardware-encrypted drives open with the credentials and by no other route. Worth checking with your IT department first — the key is escrowed far more often than people expect.
Send the device over with a short account of what happened to it. The diagnostic costs nothing and commits you to nothing, and the figure that follows is fixed in writing before anything is opened.
Nothing can begin until the device is on the bench, which makes this the only step that needs anything from you. Pack it properly, put your details in with it, and send it over. What follows is a free diagnostic and a written figure, in that order.
Posting it? Use something tracked and insured — whatever is on the drive is worth considerably more than the postage. Bringing it in? Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, and it still wants packing as above for the journey.
Tell us what the device is, what it is doing, and anything already tried — an engineer will come back with a realistic view of the odds and a price band, before you commit to posting anything.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 0161 871 0788.
For larger jobs and business clients, yes — ring and we will arrange it. Otherwise rsquo;re about forty miles away via the m56, roughly 64 minutes. Insured post works equally well and return shipping is included.
Yes, and there is no obligation attached. You get a written answer on what failed, what is realistically recoverable and one fixed price. If the answer is that nothing can be done, or that software would manage it, you hear that instead of an invoice.
Hard drives, SSDs and NVMe, external drives, USB sticks and memory cards, Macs with removable storage, RAID arrays, NAS units, servers and virtual machines. We don’t recover phones or tablets.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB media, from £300 plus VAT for a single drive, laptop or Mac with removable storage, £550 plus VAT flat for a Fusion Drive, and from £500 plus VAT for RAID, NAS and servers — each quoted in writing after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
It comes back on fresh media and our working copies are securely destroyed after a retention period you choose. Nothing is kept beyond that, and data never leaves the UK.
Almost never. A failed screen, board or power circuit has nothing to do with the drive, and where the drive lifts out it is read on separate equipment. A dead laptop is usually an inconvenience rather than a loss.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 40 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.