One bench · London · Croydon · Hackney · Ealing · Lambeth
An array that has shed a member and will not rebuild. A NAS reporting its volume unavailable. A card the camera insists on formatting. A Mac stopped at the flashing folder. A stick sheared off at the connector. Almost all of that is a hardware fault rather than a data fault, and the files are still where they were written. Naming the fault costs nothing. What follows is a single figure, set down on paper, and it then stays where it is: cards and sticks £250 + VAT, one drive £300 + VAT, and £500 + VAT upwards from the second disk onward. Where nothing comes home, most jobs cost you nothing at all.
Put it to an engineer and hear the price
0203 0868633
What is yours stored on?
Choose the closest match. You get a likely cause, the band it falls in, and the one thing not to do this evening.
Fifteen years old, powering up, and no longer identifying itself to Windows. The steady click was a head retrying, so it was not run again. A matched donor gave up its heads, the disk was read in one careful pass in clean air, and the photographs were lifted from the image.
With two bays showing red the unit was still entirely recoverable. What did the damage was the rebuild begun afterwards, which wrote across the metadata the box holds for itself. Recovery meant a complete copy of every disk, weak sectors included, then putting the mirror back together block by block, drawing each one from whichever disk had read it cleanly. Every share opened exactly as it had before.
A 512GB SanDisk that read as empty at breakfast; by the close of the job every frame was accounted for. Nothing was ever written to the card — a clone was lifted from it, and everything after that ran on the copy. Most of the work was putting the file system back together, and a deep carve turned up the frames whose directory entries had gone. The photographer kept the client.
Before anything else a write blocker went on, and the disk from the recorder was copied. The proprietary video format was then decoded and matched against the time codes, and out of that came the hour the insurer had asked for, returned as a file on its own.
Tribunals, claims and court files
For most people the job ends when the files go back. Not for everyone: a tribunal, an insurance claim, a dispute between an employer and somebody who has left. On work of that kind the handling of evidence starts with the parcel itself — every copy made behind a write blocker, hashes checked against one another, an exhibit reference opened, each step recorded as it is carried out. Whatever could not be read is recorded too, along with the reason.
Nothing is examined before it has been imaged — machines, disks and cards alike — and the examination then runs on that image, each step logged as it is taken. CPR Part 35 governs the civil reports. This laboratory holds neither ISO 17025 nor UKAS accreditation, and page one of every report states that outright, which is more than most will put on paper. Solicitors, insurers, employers and private individuals all instruct here. Such work begins at £800 + VAT, and an instruction is accepted only from somebody entitled to have the device examined.
Footage gone from the menu, or shut in a recorder that no longer comes on. The race is against the machine writing over itself, and how long that takes depends on the model and on the way somebody set it up, so ring sooner rather than later. Indexing is done against the time codes on the disk, and the window you want is exported from there. Recorder work is £400 + VAT.
Use the panel above, or ring. You get a case number straight away, with packing instructions so that the device travels safely. Post it overnight and an answer is waiting for you after nine.
Insured, tracked post to the intake lab. Nobody collects and there is nowhere to walk into, and we pay the postage home whichever way the job turns out.
An engineer settles two things at the bench: which component has failed, and how much of the media can honestly be read back. Allow roughly 48 hours from a single disk landing. That stage carries no charge, and you may stop at it owing nothing.
Findings and price arrive together, and nothing chargeable begins until you have agreed to the price.
What is recovered travels home on fresh media we buy in for your job, with two to seven working days at the bench on most jobs. Your case stays open until you have opened the files yourself and confirmed they are right.
Many thanks for saving my data, you have saved all my daya files. It was a pleasure to do business with you and I will be in contact if I have any further problems.
On behalf of my entire family I would like to say a big thank you for retrieving our family photos going back 10 years. I can't actually believe you have been able to recover all the data for us.
I tried two other data recovery companies in London but they could not recover my precious data. Thank goodness I found yourselves. Advanced Data Recovery London recovered everything including accounts and vat files.
Each power-up takes a little more surface off a failing drive. Cut the power, post it to us, and back comes an honest account of how much still reads, with the price of getting it home. That account is free, and so is the parcel returning.