Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Lancaster and the surrounding Lancashire area.
Roughly 22 minutes and 51 miles separate Lancaster from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Morecambe, Heysham and Carnforth and the wider Lancashire area.
At fifty-one miles this is toward the edge of what we cover in person, and most Lancaster work reaches us by insured courier — overnight, tracked, booked in the morning it lands. The distance affects logistics rather than the recovery.
Lancaster runs on two universities, healthcare, and a historic city centre economy with tourism and professional services alongside. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: research data and theses, departmental storage, clinical practice systems, and home machines with decades of material on them. Research data is the material we treat most carefully — fieldwork that cannot be repeated has no market value and enormous personal value, which is a poor combination for a DIY attempt.
Drawn from the work rather than from a capability list.
Lancaster runs on two universities, healthcare, and a historic city centre economy with tourism and professional services alongside, and the recovery work follows directly from that. In practice what reaches the bench from here is research data and theses, departmental storage, clinical practice systems, and home machines with decades of material on them — a different mix from, say, a market town or a university city, and one that shapes how we quote and how quickly we move.
Research data is the material we treat most carefully — fieldwork that cannot be repeated has no market value and enormous personal value, which is a poor combination for a DIY attempt.
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 Lancaster and across Lancashire 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 Lancaster 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.
For larger jobs and business clients, yes — ring and we will arrange it. Otherwise rsquo;re about fifty-one miles away via the m6, roughly 81 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 51 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.