Free 48-hour diagnostic, a fixed price agreed before any work, and no fix no fee on most jobs. Serving Wirral and the surrounding Merseyside area.
Roughly 28 minutes and 40 miles separate Wirral from our bench — drop it in yourself, or put it in the post.
Covering Birkenhead, Wallasey and Heswall and the wider Merseyside area.
At forty miles this is toward the edge of what we cover in person, and most Wirral work reaches us by insured courier — overnight, tracked, booked in the morning it lands. The distance affects logistics rather than the recovery.
Wirral runs on maritime and shipbuilding heritage at Cammell Laird, alongside professional services, healthcare and a large commuter population. What that means for us is a particular mix of work: engineering and marine drawings, practice and clinic systems, and home machines from the residential areas out toward Heswall and West Kirby. Marine engineering work brings drawings and project files that span decades, frequently on storage that has been migrated between systems more than once.
Covering Birkenhead, Wallasey and Heswall and the surrounding area.
Every town sends us a slightly different set of problems, because the economy decides what people are storing and on what. Wirral is built on maritime and shipbuilding heritage at Cammell Laird, alongside professional services, healthcare and a large commuter population — so the devices that arrive here are engineering and marine drawings, practice and clinic systems, and home machines from the residential areas out toward Heswall and West Kirby.
Marine engineering work brings drawings and project files that span decades, frequently on storage that has been migrated between systems more than once.
That matters for two practical reasons. It tells us what to expect before a device arrives, which shortens the diagnostic. And it means the questions we ask on the phone are the ones relevant to your situation rather than a script — a production line PC and a family laptop are not the same conversation, even when the drive inside them is identical.
Written out, because “send it in and we’ll be in touch” is not much of an answer.
Your device is booked in the day it arrives and you are told it landed. Where the symptoms suggest mechanical damage it is examined before being powered at all — family, firmware revision and head configuration identified first, because powering a damaged drive to see what happens is how recoverable data stops being recoverable.
Within about 48 hours you get a written answer to four questions: what failed, whether the platters or flash are damaged, what proportion is realistically recoverable, and one fixed price. Nothing is chargeable until you have agreed that figure, and it does not move afterwards.
From approval, the device is imaged read-only and every reconstruction attempt runs against that copy, so nothing we try can reduce what is recoverable. Files are opened in their applications rather than counted, anything unreadable is named, and the recovered data goes back to Wirral on fresh media with return shipping included.
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 forty miles away via the m53, roughly 64 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 40 miles away rather than at the end of a courier chain. Walk it in, or send it insured — both start the same way.