Free 48hr diagnostic, an agreed fixed price prior to any work being done and no charge for most of the jobs that don't succeed. We serve Greater Manchester as well as the surrounding areas.
Regardless of where in Greater Manchester you're located our bench is centrally based — we're in the heart of the city centre at Peter House, Oxford Street. Send it through the post or bring it along with you.
Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan. All these locations are covered within Greater Manchester and the wider Greater Manchester region.
Peter House is located in the heart of Greater Manchester. Our location is on Oxford Street close to Oxford Road Station and a short walk from Piccadilly Station. Deliver a device to us between 9am and 5:30pm, Monday to Friday.
The economy of Greater Manchester is comprised of 10 very distinct boroughs — the centre and Salford have professional services & media, the north has engineering, there are distribution centres all along the M62 & M6, and a large university & healthcare sector is located throughout. Therefore our work has a unique combination of recovery types: from a single family laptop to multi shelf arrays from corporate data rooms. Due to the location of the M60, no part of Greater Manchester is much more than 40 minutes from us; additionally, as a result of this proximity, most of the county prefers to drop off their equipment instead of posting it.
These are drawn from the jobs that are sent to us, as opposed to being selected out of a capability list.
As stated above, the economy of Greater Manchester consists of 10 very distinct boroughs — the centre and Salford contain professional services & media, the northern area has engineering, there are distribution facilities located along both sides of the M62 & M6, and a large university and healthcare sector is located throughout. As such, the work that arrives at our bench from Greater Manchester includes everything from a single family laptop to multi-shelf arrays from corporate data rooms. This is different from other areas and impacts how we provide pricing and how quickly we can perform recoveries.
Because of the M60 there is no part of Greater Manchester that's farther away than about 40 minutes from us; and most of Greater Manchester drop their equipment in rather than posting it.
In addition to that we get the normal run of household work that comes out of all areas: laptops that won't start up again, external drives full of photos, camera memory cards that were reformatted accidentally. These are priced from £250 to £300 + VAT and generally make for our fastest turnaround times. Business and array recovery work coming from anywhere in Greater Manchester starts at £500 + VAT.
There's no cost, there's no delay, and they decide more than most of what happens at the bench.
The clicking and grinding of a hard disk gets worse the longer it runs. The amount of time since the first noise has been made by the hard disk is the number one determining factor for how well it can be recovered.
Even though a hard disk may be reading very slowly and generating errors, it is still readable, and that window can close without warning. Copy the most valuable files first, to somewhere else.
Windows, macOS and cameras all offer to repair, initialise or format. All will overwrite the data structures a recovery can use.
When installing the program for recovery, it will write in the area where your deleted files exist. If you try software, install it and recover to different hard drives.
Frequently an initial phone call will determine if sending a piece of equipment is necessary, as well as sometimes show that you can fix it yourself in Greater Manchester without needing our help.
Everyone loses when you waste time going to see an expert unnecessarily.
Phones and tablets. This is not something we take on; modern mobile devices have such sophisticated encryption schemes to protect your data that attempting to recover information via third parties is extremely difficult, so if images are what matter to you, realistically using iCloud, Google Photos or a backup is the most likely solution, as opposed to a lab.
Soldered Mac storage on a dead board. The flash is soldered onto T2 and Apple Silicon systems along with being encrypted by the security chip. Therefore, once that main board dies, there will be absolutely no one able to recover anything off that board – none of us, nor Apple, nor those who quote four figures for extracting at the board level.
Encryption without the key. BitLocker, FileVault and hardware encrypted drives are opened only through providing credentials. Before calling us check with your IT team; they may hold the escrowed keys — more often than you'd think.
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.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN – Monday to Friday – 9am – 5:30 pm. We're located in Greater Manchester ourselves, on Oxford Street. Alternatively post it to us insured — both ways free return postage.
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.
Diagnostics are free of charge, and on the majority of our jobs there is no fee unless we recover your data, and we've been recovering data for two decades from the centre of Greater Manchester. Come into Manchester or post your device fully insured.
Our office is located at Oxford Street M1 5AN – centrally located to Greater Manchester, just a few minutes away from Oxford Road Station and a short walk from Piccadilly. Just drop off your device, or send us your device via tracked post; we'll do a diagnostic for free either way.