Two drives with identical symptoms can be an hour apart in one case and a week of clean-room work in the other. Price follows the fault, and the fault can't be known until the drive is examined — which is why any company quoting a firm price before seeing your device is guessing, and why our model (and the honest end of the industry) is a free diagnostic first, then one fixed quote you can accept or decline.
What the diagnostic determines: is the failure logical (deleted files, corruption — the drive itself is healthy), electronic (PCB, USB bridge), firmware, or mechanical (heads, motor — clean-room territory)? Each step up that ladder adds parts, hours and specialist equipment, and that's what you're paying for.
Across the UK market, straightforward logical recoveries (deleted files, corrupted file systems on healthy drives) typically run in the low hundreds. Electronic and firmware faults sit in the mid hundreds. Mechanical failures needing donor parts and clean-room work usually land between the mid hundreds and around a thousand, with multi-drive RAID, NAS and server jobs above that, priced by complexity. As a fixed point of reference, our CCTV/DVR recorder recoveries are a set £400 + VAT.
Treat those as orientation, not a menu — the whole point of a free diagnostic is that you get your number, for your fault, before committing a penny. Anything under a fixed quote is then our problem, not yours: if the job proves harder than assessed, the price you approved is the price you pay.
The industry has a reputation problem, and it comes from a few recognisable moves: the too-cheap headline price ('recovery from £49!') that balloons after 'assessment'; the assessment fee that's non-refundable whether or not anything is recoverable; the artificial urgency tier where the standard service is quietly slowed to sell the express one; and success fees defined so loosely that recovering any file — readable or not — triggers full payment.
The questions that cut through: Is the diagnostic genuinely free, including return of the device if you decline? Is the quote fixed once given? What exactly counts as a successful recovery — and do you verify the recovered files before paying? A serious lab answers all three without flinching. Under our no fix, no fee policy, 'fix' means the data you actually needed, verified — not a technicality.
Act early: a clicking drive powered off at the first click is a cheaper job than one that's been retried for a week. Don't stack DIY attempts — every recovery tool run on a failing drive adds hours to the eventual professional job, and failed software passes are the most common way cheap jobs become expensive ones. And post the device rather than paying for on-site callouts — postage is the cheapest part of the whole process.
Start with the free online diagnostic, or read up on your device: hard drives, SSDs, external drives, NAS and RAID.
The only number that matters is a fixed quote for your actual fault. Free diagnostic → fixed price → no fix, no fee. If any of those three is missing from an offer, keep shopping.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.