One bench · Nottingham · Derby · Leicester · Lincoln · Boston
Ticking on power-up. A card the camera insists needs formatting. A pen drive snapped at its connector. An array that dropped a member and will not rebuild. A Mac stuck on the flashing folder. Nearly every one of those, in Nottingham as anywhere, is a hardware problem rather than a data problem, and the files are still sitting on the media. An engineer names the fault at no charge; after that one figure goes in writing and it does not move — £250 + VAT on cards and sticks, £300 + VAT on a single drive, £500 + VAT upwards once more than one disk is involved. Most jobs carry no fee whatever if the data does not come back.
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Which of these is your data on?
Pick the nearest match. Back comes a probable cause, your price band, and the single move to avoid tonight.
A matched donor gave up its head stack. Clean surface on both sides of the scored band went into the image first, and the photo library was put back together from that image, never from the disk itself.
At two red lights the unit was still perfectly recoverable. The damage came from the rebuild started afterwards, which wrote over the metadata the box keeps for itself. Recovery meant a full copy of each disk, weak sectors and all, then reassembling the mirror block by block, taking every block from whichever disk still read it cleanly. All the shares opened exactly as before.
A 512GB SanDisk read as empty first thing in the morning; by the end of the job every frame was back. The card itself was never written to — a clone came off it and every attempt after that ran against the copy. Rebuilding the file system accounted for most of it, and a deep carve picked up the images whose directory entries had gone. The client stayed with the photographer.
A write blocker went on before anything else and the recorder's disk was copied. Next came the proprietary video format, decoded and matched to the time codes; out of that fell the hour the insurer had asked for, sent back as a file on its own.
Insurance claims & court files
Once the files go back, most jobs are finished. Some are not: a tribunal, an insurance claim, an argument between an employer and somebody who has gone. Work of that sort has its evidence handling start at the parcel — a write blocker on every copy, hashes checked, an exhibit reference raised, each step written down while it is being done. Whatever could not be read gets written down as well, and why.
Imaging comes before examination, always — machines, disks and cards alike — and the examining is then done on that image, each step logged while it happens. CPR Part 35 governs the civil reports. No ISO 17025 and no UKAS accreditation is held here; page one of every report states it plainly, which is more than most labs will put in writing anywhere. Instructions come from solicitors, insurers, employers and private individuals. Work opens at £800 + VAT, and only somebody entitled to have the device examined may instruct it.
Footage missing from the menu, or shut inside a recorder that has stopped coming on. What you are racing is the machine writing across itself, and how long that takes is down to the model and the way somebody set it up, so the sooner you ring the better. Indexing runs against the disk's own time codes, then the window you want is exported. £400 + VAT covers recorder work.
Use the panel further up, or ring. Straight back comes a case number and instructions for packing, so the device travels safely. Send it overnight and a reply is waiting for you after nine.
Tracked, insured post to the intake lab. There is no collection round and nowhere here to walk into, and the journey home is on us whichever way the job goes.
Which component has gone, and how much of the media will honestly read back: an engineer settles both at the bench. Reckon on about 48 hours from a single disk arriving. No charge attaches to that stage, and you may stop there owing nothing.
The findings and the number arrive together, and no chargeable work begins until you have said yes to it.
Recovered data goes home on new media at our expense, most jobs running two to seven working days on the bench. The case stays open until you have opened every file and told us it is right.
The level of service and attention to detail has been spectacular! My external hard drive where I kept my entire electronic life crashed, but you were able to fully recover all my data.
I was devastated when my portable hard drive quit working. I had so much important information on it and I thought it was lost forever. Thank you a million times for saving my life (I mean my data!).
A great job from a very professional and polite company. Highly recommended.
A failing drive gives up a little more surface each time it is powered up. Unplug it, send it in, and you will be told how much still reads and what getting it back would cost. Neither the answer nor the parcel coming home is charged for.