Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Crewe and the surrounding Cheshire area.
Roughly 30 minutes and 35 miles separate Crewe from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Nantwich, Sandbach and Middlewich and the wider Cheshire area.
At thirty-five miles this is toward the edge of what we cover in person, and most Crewe work reaches us by insured courier — overnight, tracked, booked in the morning it lands. The distance affects logistics rather than the recovery.
Crewe runs on railway engineering and its long supply chain, automotive manufacturing, and distribution along the M6. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: engineering design files, production and process systems, and CCTV from industrial premises. Railway and automotive engineering both run equipment for decades, so Crewe sends us a steady supply of drives from machines nobody expected to outlive their operating system.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Crewe runs on railway engineering and its long supply chain, automotive manufacturing, and distribution along the M6, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is engineering design files, production and process systems, and CCTV from industrial premises — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Railway and automotive engineering both run equipment for decades, so Crewe sends us a steady supply of drives from machines nobody expected to outlive their operating system.
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 Crewe 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 Crewe on fresh media with return shipping included.
It costs us the job and it is the right answer.
The drive still mounts and reads. Copy your files off yourself, most important first, then stop using it. There is nothing a laboratory adds to a drive you can still read.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Cloud version history, Time Machine, Previous Versions, a copy emailed to somebody. A meaningful share of enquiries end here, in five minutes, for nothing.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software installed to a different drive will often do it for a fraction of our fee.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. On a work machine it is almost certainly held by IT in Azure AD or Intune. One question resolves more of these than any technical work we do.
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 thirty-five miles away via the m6, roughly 56 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 35 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.