from £45

Data recovery in Staines

Photographs, documents and years of accumulated files are the part of a computer that cannot be bought again. When a drive starts to fail or a machine stops booting, what happens in the first few hours makes a substantial difference to how much comes back.

An assessment takes a day at most and tells you two things: what is realistically recoverable, and what it will cost. Nothing goes ahead until you have both figures.

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The situations this covers

Recovery covers rather more than a drive that has died outright — most cases arrive as one of the following:

Files or photographs deleted, or a folder emptied by accident
A drive that clicks, ticks, or disappears from the machine at random
Windows will not boot and the recovery options do not help
An external drive that asks to be formatted every time it is plugged in
A phone or camera card that shows no photographs
A laptop that was dropped, or one that had a drink spilled over it

Stop using it — genuinely, right now

A deleted file is still on the disk until something else is written over it, so every minute the machine stays on lowers the odds. If the data matters, shut it down and leave it off. Running a downloaded recovery tool on the same drive is the most common way people overwrite the exact thing they were trying to save, because the tool has to be written to the disk in order to run.

What is recoverable here, and what is not

Logical damage — deleted files, corrupted partitions, a drive that reads but will not mount, a failing disk that still spins — is handled in the workshop by imaging the drive first and working on the copy, never the original. A drive with physical damage, one that is clicking or has stopped spinning, needs a cleanroom and specialist equipment. That is a different service at a different price, and you will be told plainly if that is what yours needs rather than being charged to find out.

The part that stops it happening twice

Once the files are back, the twenty minutes spent setting up a backup that runs on its own is worth more than the recovery was. One copy in the house and one off it — an external drive plus cloud storage — covers both a failed disk and a burglary, and costs a small fraction of what a recovery attempt does. It is offered as part of the job rather than sold separately.

What it costs

The assessment is free, and it is deliberately the first step: recovery prices depend entirely on the state of the drive, and a figure quoted before looking at it would be a guess. Logical recovery starts at £45 and is quoted in full once the drive has been assessed — you decide with the number in front of you. Backup setup and data transfer afterwards is £40.

See the full price list