Your data,
recovered.

In many cases, yes — and what decides the outcome isn't our lab: it's what was done with the drive before it was brought in. A drive that won't boot may have a logical failure — a damaged partition table, a corrupted file system — or a physical one, and the prognosis is very different in each case. If it's also making noises, sharp clicks or a hum it didn't make before, stop switching it on: every attempt to boot makes the mechanical damage worse and reduces what's left to rescue. We explain this in detail in what to do when your hard drive makes a noise. We start with a diagnosis, which is deducted from the quote if you accept it, tell you how feasible recovery really is and what it will cost, and only then do you decide. If the case can't be solved, we tell you so: charging to attempt the impossible isn't a service.

Stop using the computer right now. A deleted file doesn't vanish at once: the system marks that space as free and reuses it as soon as it needs to write something. Every minute the computer stays on — an update, the browser saving its cache, the antivirus doing its rounds — is another chance for something to land right on top of what you want to recover. The most expensive mistake is downloading and installing a “free” recovery program on the very drive affected, because the installation itself writes exactly where it shouldn't. We go into this in why you shouldn't format before recovering data. If these are files that matter to you, switch the computer off, don't restart it “to see if they turn up” and bring it to us. The less that has been written over them, the more can be recovered.

Yes. As well as hard drives and SSDs, we work with SD and microSD cards, USB sticks and phones. Each type of media has its own difficulties: with cards the problem is usually the controller or the contacts rather than the memory itself, and with SSDs TRIM comes into play, which can genuinely wipe blocks marked as free shortly after they're deleted — which is why speed matters more with an SSD than with a mechanical drive. With mobiles it depends on the model and the encryption: a modern handset with a broken screen is usually recoverable, whereas one that no longer boots and is encrypted may not be. As in every other case, the diagnosis comes first and we tell you what's there before we touch anything.

There are three indicative price bands, excluding VAT, plus a prior diagnosis that costs €40 to €60 depending on the device and is deducted in full if you accept the quote. If the drive is healthy and what's failed is the external enclosure or the computer, copying the data to another drive costs €80 to €150. A logical failure — deletion, formatting, a damaged partition or file system — costs €200 to €400. And a physical, firmware or controller failure, which requires lab work, costs €500 to €1,500. The drive the data is delivered on is charged separately, and RAID or NAS systems are quoted according to the number of drives. Which band you're in isn't known until the diagnosis, which is why the fixed figure comes after we've seen the device and not over the phone. We explain what moves the price within each band in how much it costs to recover data from a drive. If we don't recover anything, you only pay for the diagnosis.

With backups that someone has actually checked. Data recovery is always plan B, and it always costs more than plan A. The benchmark is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of anything you can't afford to lose, on two different types of media, with one of them outside the building. The part almost nobody does is the last one, and it's the only one that proves anything: restoring the backup and checking that the file opens. A backup that has never been restored isn't a backup, it's an assumption. You'll find the step-by-step method in the 3-2-1 backup rule, and if you're torn between a NAS in the office or a cloud backup, NAS or cloud shows that the choice depends on where your point of failure is, not on price.