Free 48-hour diagnostics. Fixed price agreed before any work is done on your device. Most jobs will have no charge to you at all if we can’t recover your data. Manchester and the surrounding Greater Manchester area are covered by our services.
Peter House, central Manchester — drop-in service available during weekdays; insured postage is available when it suits you.
Our data recovery services cover Salford, Stockport and Trafford along with other areas of the Greater Manchester region.
We are located in Manchester — in Peter House on Oxford Street, approximately a few minutes’ walk from Oxford Road train station and walkable from Piccadilly. You can hand over your device to be recovered between 9am and 5:30pm during a weekday.
Manchester has a city centre economy based upon professional services, media, universities and a significant and increasing technology sector. Therefore our specific mix of work is agency and studio machines, chambers and practice servers, university research drives, and the NAS boxes small firms in the Northern Quarter operate all their systems with. We are located on Oxford Street, close to Oxford Road station, and within walking distance from Piccadilly. So most city centre drop-offs can be completed in the time it takes to have a cup of coffee.
These are drawn from the jobs that are sent to us, as opposed to being selected out of a capability list.
Manchester's economy is centred on professional services, media, universities, and a significant and growing technology sector. Thus the recovery work we do is also dependent on these areas. As such, the types of devices and equipment that reach us from Manchester include agency and studio machines, chambers and practice servers, university research drives, and the NAS boxes small firms in the Northern Quarter use to manage their operations — which is different from those from other areas, and therefore will shape our quotation process and our response times.
We are located on Oxford Street, a few minutes from Oxford Road station, and within walking distance from Piccadilly. Therefore most city centre drop-offs can be completed in the time it would take to have a cup of coffee.
There is also a typical load of domestic work, as with every place; laptops that won't start again, external drives full of photos, camera cards that have been formatted by mistake. These types of jobs cost from £250 to £300 plus VAT and frequently take the least amount of time for us to complete. Any commercial/array work coming from Manchester and across Greater Manchester begins at £500 plus 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.
Most times talking briefly determines whether the machine needs to be sent at all — and sometimes you can fix it yourself from Manchester without sending it away.
This costs us the job, but it's the right answer.
The drive still mounts and reads. Just copy your files off yourself — most important items first — then stop using it. Nothing a lab does to a readable drive you already own can add anything useful.
The files are in a backup you forgot about. Check the version history in the cloud. Or Time Machine. Or Previous Versions. Or a copy someone emailed. Many enquiries are resolved in just five minutes, at no cost.
A recent deletion from a healthy drive. Reputable read-only software, installed on a separate drive, will often do it for just a fraction of what we charge.
Your BitLocker key exists after all. It's almost always held by IT in Azure AD or Intune if it's on a company workstation. That one question has resolved more of these issues than anything else we have done technically.
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.
Yes, for bigger jobs/business clients we do — give us a ring and we'll sort it out. Otherwise we are based in Manchester on Oxford Street. Also insured postal service works just as well — and we include postage back.
Yes, and there is no contract obligation. You receive a written report detailing what failed, what is realistically recoverable and a single fixed price. If we determine that nothing can be recovered from your data set or that a piece of software would be able to do it then you will be told as much rather than being billed.
Hard disk drives, solid state disks (SSDs) & NVMe, external hard disk drives, USB sticks & memory cards, Macintosh computers equipped with removable storage, RAID arrays, NAS units, servers and virtual machines. Note: we do not recover smartphones or tablets.
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.
Your data comes back to you on new media. Our working copies of your data will be safely erased at the end of a time frame you specify. Your data does not leave the UK.
Almost never. A bad display, logic board or power circuit will have no impact upon the drive itself. And as drives that pull out are typically read with other tools, a dead laptop is more often than not a nuisance instead of a complete data loss.
Free written diagnosis, free on most jobs unless successful, and two decades of experience in recovering the irreplaceable from the centre of Manchester. Drop off at Peter House or post it over.