Although two drives may show identical symptoms, one could take as little as an hour and the other a full week of work on the head-swap bench. Ultimately, the cost follows the fault, and the fault cannot be known until the drive has been examined. That is why any company offering you a firm price without examining your device is guessing, and why our business model (like the honest end of the industry) is a free diagnostic first, then one fixed quote you can either accept or decline.
What the diagnostic will determine is whether the failure of your drive is logical (deleted files, corrupted data: the drive itself is healthy), electronic (PCB, USB bridge), firmware, or mechanical (heads, motor: head-swap bench work). Each step up that ladder adds parts, hours and specialist equipment, and those are the costs that you are paying for.
Across the UK marketplace, when dealing with simple logical recoveries (lost or deleted files, a bad file system on an otherwise good hard drive), prices generally fall within the lower hundreds. Electronic and firmware faults typically cost in the middle hundreds. Mechanical failures requiring donor parts and head-swap bench work are often charged in the mid hundreds to around a thousand pounds. Multi-drive RAID, NAS and server jobs are charged above that, based on their level of complexity. As a fixed point of reference, our CCTV/DVR recovery services have a set fee of £400 + VAT.
Please do not look upon the preceding figures as a menu. We provide free diagnostics because we wish to give you your price for your fault before you spend any money. Anything under a fixed quote then becomes our problem, not yours: if the job proves harder than our initial assessment, you still pay what you originally agreed to.
The industry has a bad reputation issue, and this reputation issue starts from several well-known manoeuvres: the too-cheap initial price ('recovery from £49!') which then explodes after the 'assessment', the non-refundable assessment fee you still have to pay whether or not anything was recoverable, the standard service quietly slowed down to sell the express service, and success fees defined so loosely that recovering any file, readable or not, triggers full payment.
There are three questions that address all the above concerns. Are diagnostics truly free, including returning your device if you choose to decline the recovery? Is the quote fixed once given? Exactly what counts as a successful recovery, and are your recovered files verified before you pay? Labs that answer all three questions without hesitation are serious labs. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data, and "recovery" means we successfully located and verified the exact files you needed, not some technicality.
Time is money: a clicking drive that is switched off at the first click will be less expensive to recover than a drive that has been retried for days or weeks. Do not make multiple attempts with DIY recovery tools on a drive that is failing, as each additional attempt will add many hours to the professional job, and failed software passes are the most common way an inexpensive recovery job becomes an expensive one. Get a quote first, then post your device to us rather than paying for an on-site callout, as postage is always the least expensive part of the whole process.
Start here with the free online diagnostic, or learn more about your device: hard drives, SSDs, external drives, NAS and RAID.
What truly counts is a fixed quoted price for your actual problem. The diagnostic is free, a fixed price quote follows the diagnostic, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. If any part of this formula is missing from an offer, continue searching.
A free diagnostic test, a fixed price quote, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Start the process now, or call us today on our freephone number.