We will provide you with free 48-hour diagnostics; we agree on a fixed price prior to any work being done; and there is nothing to pay on most jobs if it fails. We serve Salford and the surrounding Greater Manchester area.
It is about 2 miles and approximately 15 minutes to travel from Salford to our workshop – either take it in yourself or send it to us.
Our services include Eccles, Swinton, Worsley and other locations within the Greater Manchester area.
Salford is about two miles west of us via the A6 and M602 — roughly 15 minutes during off-peak hours. Therefore many customers drop their devices at the workshop while they are passing as opposed to sending them.
Salford runs on MediaCityUK, which houses the media production industry, and has a substantial logistics presence. We also get lots of data recovery requests from students who study at the University of Salford. There's quite an interesting mix of data we see here with camera cards and shuttle drives coming in from film productions; RAID arrays coming in from the editing suites; and student data from their studies at the university. Media production brings its own pattern: footage lost between shoot and edit, on memory cards or portable SSDs that have been inserted into many card readers during the week.
Recovery covering Eccles, Swinton & Worsley, and the areas around them.
Each town presents a slightly unique problem due to how the local economy influences what type of devices are used and therefore what types of failures occur. In Salford there is a strong focus on media production through MediaCityUK. That means the devices that arrive here are camera cards and shuttle drives off shoots, edit-suite RAID arrays, and student work from the university.
We have a high number of media production customers here and they also produce some unusual patterns – such as video footage going missing between shoot and edit, on memory cards or portable SSDs which have gone in and out of card readers all week.
There are two important functional reasons why. It helps tell us what to expect once an item has arrived at our location and allows us to shorten the diagnostic time. And when we call you to determine how to proceed with recovering your drive, the questions we ask are related to your situation versus reading from a script — a production line computer and a family laptop, although they have the same exact hard drive installed, are not going to be similar conversations.
Regardless of whether the job is walked in or sent via a courier service, the steps are the same.
Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, Monday to Friday 9 am – 5:30 pm – or insured post from Salford. Please remember to remove the hard drive or SSD when you send it. We cannot accept complete laptops or desktop systems.
The fault type will be identified — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — so the route, pricing and probability of recovery can be determined.
There is one price quoted prior to the job being worked on, which doesn’t change once accepted. If software would do the job, or no recovery is possible, then that will be communicated to you instead.
Recovery will be done as a read-only image. The rebuild is created from a copy. This is verified by opening files rather than just counting them. The results are sent back to Salford on new media with free shipping.
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, we do provide services in Salford. And surrounding areas like Eccles, Swinton & Worsley. We are approximately 2 miles down the A6 and along the M602 which takes approximately 15 minutes. Both drop-off and insured post can begin our free 48-hour diagnostic.
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.
A normal 48-hour turnaround is expected for the diagnostic. A single drive generally takes 3–4 working days from approval to completion. Longer lead-times are anticipated for array & donor part projects, and you receive the estimated timeline with your quote.
Please send us just the hard disk or solid state drive – we do not accept whole laptops or PC systems. It takes a few minutes to get the drive removed by any local computer shop in Salford. If you're using an external unit then please include the case.
In most cases you pay nothing. We provide a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic, and in the event that we cannot recover data from your device — again in most cases — there is no additional charge — except for forensic examination, CCTV & data destruction which are explicitly identified when providing an estimate.
Yes. Your data will remain here within the UK, your work will never be outsourced, our non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are signed as standard for all commercial work, and working copies of your files are kept only for the retention period you decide, then destroyed.
Our free 48-hour diagnostic has no charge and most of our jobs cost nothing unless we can recover the data. Our Manchester office is 2 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain, so walking in isn’t a bad option either. Or send it via insured post — either way starts off exactly the same.