Six bands · none of them hidden
Data recovery prices, London. All six bands in print, and your own figure follows a free look, on paper.
Six numbers run this business and every one of them is on this page: a card or a pen drive £250 + VAT, one disk £300 + VAT, a recorder £400 + VAT, anything holding a second disk from £500 + VAT, forensic instructions from £800 + VAT, SAN and enterprise storage from £1,250 + VAT. Hunt for that list on a rival site and you will usually meet a contact form instead. Finding your own device on it takes a moment, getting to the exact figure is free whichever postcode the parcel leaves from, and a recovery that comes to nothing goes uninvoiced on most jobs.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
The opening figure, by job.
| Band opens at | The sort of job | What falls inside that band |
|---|---|---|
| £250 plus VAT | Card and stick media | Any flash: SD, microSD, CompactFlash and USB pen drives |
| £300 plus VAT | Just the one disk | A spinning disk, an SSD or an NVMe stick — bare, or still in the laptop |
| £300 plus VAT | Apple, any model | HFS+, APFS and FileVault, T2 security chips, Apple silicon |
| £400 plus VAT | Recorders, DVR and NVR | The box itself, not the cameras: Hikvision, Dahua, Swann and the rest |
| £500 plus VAT, and upwards | RAID sets, NAS and servers | Enclosures by Synology, QNAP and WD; ProLiant, PowerEdge and Lenovo machines; RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 |
| £500 plus VAT, and upwards | Databases, and mail stores | MySQL and PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Exchange |
| £800 plus VAT, and upwards | Datastores from virtual machines | Damaged VM folders, and snapshot chains that refuse to resolve — VMDK, VHDX, VHD, QCOW2 |
| £800 plus VAT, and upwards | Forensic instructions, written up | Civil and employment matters, with each step recorded as it happens |
| £1,250 plus VAT, and upwards | SANs and big arrays | One volume spread across more than a single array |
Yours not on the list? One pass through the symptom checker returns three things at once: the band you are in, the likeliest fault behind it, and what to leave well alone before the device is packed.
Four things that go with the grid.
- Not one figure above includes VAT; the standard rate is added on top.
- Treat them as opening figures rather than bills. The fault that turns up settles what you actually pay. That number is written down for you as soon as the free diagnosis is over, and never after money has changed hands.
- On most jobs there is no fee where the data does not return. An attempt that comes to nothing leaves you owing us nothing.
- Half the fee up front on three sorts of work: forensic instructions, recorders, and repairs that put donor components into a drive. Each spends hours and parts regardless of the outcome. The balance follows once your data is back with you.
What shifts a figure within its band.
Once that figure has reached you.
| Where things stand | The usual reason for it | What you are charged |
|---|---|---|
| You take the figure | Bench work opens at that price | Payable once you have read the file list |
| You turn the figure down | The device travels home with the findings | Not a penny — not for the look, and not for the postage home |
| Nothing is recovered | Most jobs: nothing to pay unless the data returns | No invoice is raised |
| A further fault shows up | Bench work pauses and you are rung before anything else | The price you agreed stands |
| Donor parts, recorders and forensic work | Half at the start, half when the data is back | Set out plainly beforehand |
| Another firm has already opened it | Quoted on its own merits after the look | No-fee cover may not apply |
What a £49 advertisement is really offering
- £49 buys a diagnosis and never a recovery — what it gets you is a place in a queue and somebody's eyes on the drive. The price for the recovery itself arrives later, by which point they hold their bench already, and asking for it back has turned awkward. That same stage is free here, and a quote you refuse puts the drive in the post home at our expense.
- Ask what a failure costs — where no document anywhere commits them to charging nothing for a job that fails, there is little reason to hurry bad news towards you.
- Ask whether the number can move — ours does not. Anything the bench meets once you have said yes is absorbed at this end, and the invoice simply repeats the quotation.
- Ask who opens the drive with their own hands — plenty of outfits take a margin and hand the work onward. Whoever lifts yours out of the packaging here is the engineer who works on it, and no third party sees it in between.
Where a grid runs out of usefulness: these figures are meant literally. One hard disk with a logical fault and nothing worse is £300 + VAT — a price rather than an estimate, with nothing tacked on afterwards. Mechanical failure is the one unknown, because no published table can say ahead of time how many donor components a particular drive will need matched to it. Settling exactly that is the job of the free diagnosis, and it is why the figure is on paper ahead of anything else being done.
The questions that come up first.
How much will it be?
Your band turns on two questions: what sort of device it is, and how many disks live in it. Flash — a memory card, a pen drive — sits at £250 + VAT. Where exactly one disk is involved, spinning or solid, bare or still bolted into an iMac or a laptop, the answer is £300 + VAT. A recorder is £400 + VAT. Put a second disk in the picture — a four-bay NAS, a rack server, a RAID set — and £500 + VAT is the starting point. Forensic instructions open at £800 + VAT, and so do virtual machine datastores; SAN and enterprise storage open at £1,250 + VAT. The grid above puts the same thing more briefly, and the free diagnosis turns a band into one number on paper.
Is the first look chargeable?
No, and turning the quotation down is free as well. The postage out here is the only money you spend. Whatever the journey home costs, that sits on our invoice rather than yours.
Do you ask for money before you begin?
Half the fee falls due at the start on three sorts of job: a repair needing donor components sourced and matched, a recorder whose disk is fixed inside the chassis, and forensic instructions of every kind. One reason sits behind all three — the hours and the parts are spent whether or not the files return. Once the recovered data goes across to you, the remaining half is payable. Every other job here runs the reverse way about: on most of them, nothing recovered means nothing to pay.
When does the invoice fall due?
Between two moments. First you read what has been recovered and say whether it looks right; only afterwards is the fresh media posted out. The terms set that order down. On an ordinary job nothing is asked of you as the drive arrives, and nothing at all while an engineer is at it.
Does anything get added to the bill later?
Nothing does. The diagnosis is never charged for, the postage home is ours, and what you agreed to is what the invoice says. Priority handling is the single thing that can be added, and only where you ask for it — the amount is quoted before you decide.
A rival has quoted less. What should I ask them?
Three questions sort it out. Will that price hold once the drive is opened? What is owed if the recovery fails? And whose bench actually does the work? Here the answers run: it holds; on most jobs nothing is owed; and the drive stays in this laboratory throughout.
That is the entire list. Yours arrives in writing after a free look.
Fill the form in, or simply put the drive in the post — either route is fine. The diagnosis carries no charge, the price comes to you in writing, and what happens next is entirely your call.