We do not have branches, and that is the honest way round: a recovery happens on a bench with the right equipment behind it, so what matters is which bench your drive reaches rather than how far it travelled. A tracked box from any UK postcode gets it here overnight, and the diagnostic that follows is the same one a walk-in gets.
Distance is the least interesting variable in a recovery. Overnight carriage puts every UK postcode within a day of the same engineers and the same equipment.
Insured and tracked, with a note inside. That is genuinely all it takes.
Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN. Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, on 0161 871 0788.
Include a note with your name, a phone number, an email address, and a sentence or two about what happened — when it failed, what it was doing at the time, and whether anything has been tried since. That last detail matters more than people expect: a rebuild that was started and abandoned, or a recovery scan that ran for six hours, changes the approach entirely and is far better disclosed than discovered.
Most transit damage is avoidable and comes down to the same few things.
A bag or foam sleeve. Bubble wrap directly against a bare circuit board is not ideal, though far better than nothing at all.
A drive rattling inside a box takes small impacts for the entire journey. Fill the space rather than leaving it room to travel.
Jiffy bags offer almost no protection against being dropped or stacked under something heavy in a sorting office.
Enclosure, plus the original cable and power supply if you still have them. On many models the bridge board is part of how the disk is read at all.
For your protection rather than ours. Note the tracking number before it goes.
Because in both, the journey itself is part of the problem.
Fire or flood damage. Corrosion continues for as long as contamination sits on the components, so these are genuinely time-critical in a way other faults are not. Send it damp and sealed rather than dried, and ring so we know it is coming and can deal with it on arrival rather than the following morning.
Anything already opened.Once a drive has been opened outside filtered air, the chamber has dust in it that the heads will drag across the platters the moment anything spins. Put the lid back on, seal the whole thing in a bag, and tell us plainly what was done — it changes the approach rather than the welcome.
The same process whether it arrived by courier or came through the door.
Devices are booked in on arrival and you are told they landed. The diagnostic then sorts the fault into one of four classes — mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — because that single decision sets the method, the price and the honest odds. It normally lands within 48 hours, nothing becomes chargeable until you have agreed the figure, and if the answer is that nothing can be recovered there is nothing to pay.
Recovered data comes back on fresh media with free return shipping, and your original device is returned too unless you would rather we destroyed it securely. Prices start at £250 +VAT for cards and USB sticks and £300 +VAT for a single drive.
Box it up today and a free written diagnostic reaches you inside 48 hours of arrival in Manchester — nothing to pay until you say go.