Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Derby and the surrounding Derbyshire area.
Roughly 65 minutes and 60 miles separate Derby from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Burton, Ilkeston and Belper and the wider Derbyshire area.
At sixty miles this is toward the edge of what we cover in person, and most Derby work reaches us by insured courier — overnight, tracked, booked in the morning it lands. The distance affects logistics rather than the recovery.
Derby runs on aerospace, rail manufacturing and automotive engineering at a scale that shapes the whole city, alongside a substantial professional and university sector. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: engineering design and simulation data, manufacturing systems, quality and traceability records, and research storage. Derby is the furthest point we cover regularly and almost everything arrives by insured courier. Engineering data here is usually large, structured and business-critical, which suits array work rather than single drives.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Derby runs on aerospace, rail manufacturing and automotive engineering at a scale that shapes the whole city, alongside a substantial professional and university sector, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is engineering design and simulation data, manufacturing systems, quality and traceability records, and research storage — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Derby is the furthest point we cover regularly and almost everything arrives by insured courier. Engineering data here is usually large, structured and business-critical, which suits array work rather than single drives.
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 Derby and across Derbyshire starts from £500 +VAT.
Free, quick, and they decide more than most of what happens on the bench.
Clicking and grinding get measurably worse with runtime. How long a drive ran after the first noise is the single biggest factor in the result.
A slow drive throwing errors is still a drive you can read, and that window closes without warning. Most valuable files first, to somewhere else.
Windows, macOS and cameras all offer to format, initialise or repair. Each writes over the structures a recovery would use.
The installer writes into the space holding your deleted files. If you try software, install and recover to different drives.
A short conversation frequently establishes whether the device should travel at all — and occasionally that you can fix it yourself from Derby without us.
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.
Yes — Derby and the surrounding area including Burton, Ilkeston and Belper. We’re about sixty miles away via the A6 and M1, roughly 96 minutes. Drop-off or insured post both start the same free 48-hour diagnostic.
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.
The diagnostic is normally back inside 48 hours. From approval a single drive usually completes in three to four working days; array and donor-part work takes longer and you get the timescale with the quote.
The drive alone where you can — cheaper to post, quicker to start, and any computer shop in Derby will remove it in minutes. External units are the exception and should come complete with their enclosure.
You pay nothing on most jobs. The diagnostic is free and the majority of our work is no fix, no fee — forensic examination, CCTV and data destruction are the exceptions, and we say so before you commit.
Yes. Data stays in the UK, work is carried out in-house rather than subcontracted, NDAs are signed as standard for business work, and working copies are destroyed after a retention period you set.
The diagnostic costs nothing, most jobs carry no fee unless the data comes back, and the bench is 60 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.