Beginning with the Fens and King's Lynn across to the coast at Cromer and Yarmouth, via the Broads, the Breckland pines and all the market towns along the A11 and A47, Norfolk sends its failed drives by tracked post to one bench, and the diagnostic which identifies the fault does not cost anything.
The same prices apply in every Norfolk postcode. One drive or SSD is £300 + VAT; arrays are from £500 + VAT; after a free diagnostic which takes 2 working days from arrival.
The county of Norfolk is a large area but has very few roads across it, and the work received varies depending on which part it comes from. There are generally six patterns that cover most of a normal week.
Correspondence spanning twenty years plus accounts, spray records and herd data, all stored on a single tower under a desk and backed up to a single external drive located directly beside it. Both copies are the same age and stored in the same room, which is how one failure manages to take out both.
Damp salty air along the north coast and at the harbours works on connectors and circuit boards for many years before the mechanism has anything to say. Drives from close to the sea often fail electrically first, which is not the worst type of failure a drive can have.
Boat yards, moorings, holiday lets and village practices store bookings, footage and accounts on a two-bay or four-bay unit somewhere with poor airflow. The heat shortens the life of the disks, and if one of the members fails then the whole share drops off the network at the same time.
Machines that travel each day take the knocks that go with it: a bag dropped onto a station platform, a lid closed on a drive still spinning, a boot lid slammed shut on a laptop in its case. Dropped 2.5 inch disks are steady work here.
Wedding and landscape photographers, holiday park traders and drone operators fill up memory cards much faster than they empty them. A card that suddenly reads as blank is flash work at £250 + VAT and is usually one of the quicker jobs on the bench.
Many businesses throughout Norfolk keep their entire trading history on a single, small server or RAID box in a back office. When it drops off the network, the number of disks inside sets the price, and every member is imaged before anything is put back together.
Each town has its own page with local details about the area, and King's Lynn (often typed as Kings Lynn) is at the far west of the set. Norwich itself is the home page. Villages in between belong to whichever town is nearest, and the service works exactly the same way wherever the parcel was sent from.
PE30 to PE34, with the Wash at one end and the Fens at the other. Port and food-processing firms, quayside offices and a long scatter of home workers out along the A47 towards Swaffham and Downham Market.
NR30 and NR31, including Gorleston. Offshore and wind-farm support contractors, port and haulage firms and seafront traders, all of them running kit that spends its life in weather.
IP24, in the Breckland pines with the A11 running straight past. Distribution warehouses, food and engineering plants, and the servers that keep their production lines honest.
NR19, mid-Norfolk and the A47 halfway between Norwich and King's Lynn. Farm offices, agricultural dealers and workshops, where machinery gets repaired rather than replaced and the office PC is treated the same way.
NR18, ten minutes down the A11 from Norwich. A commuter town full of home offices, which in practice means a great many external drives doing serious work on kitchen tables.
IP22, on the Waveney at the Suffolk border, with a fast London train at the end of the platform. Small professional firms, makers and a scattering of rural business parks, all far enough from anywhere to make the post the sensible route.
NR27 and the north Norfolk coast. Hotels, holiday lets, galleries and photographers, working within a few hundred yards of salt spray that quietly eats connectors and boards.
NR21, the market town for a large stretch of north Norfolk. Estate and farm offices, print and design work, racecourse and events businesses, and a lot of single-server firms.
NR28, between the northern Broads and the Bacton gas terminals. Energy contractors, boatyards and workshops make for an unusually mixed postbag of failed drives.
NR17, on the A11 corridor between Norwich and Thetford. Food production and logistics run to a schedule that does not pause because a disk has stopped, so these come in fast and go back the same way.
There are roughly 2,000+ square miles of Norfolk and the roads show it: the A11 runs down the middle to Thetford and Cambridge, and the A47 crosses east to west from Yarmouth, through Norwich and Dereham, to King's Lynn. Additionally, there are a large number of lanes on each side of both. Not one properly equipped lab can be found within twenty minutes of all this, and pretending otherwise does no good. So the media travels instead. Get a quote first by phone or with our free online diagnostic, then send the media to us via tracked and insured post, or use a courier that you book and pay for yourself. Once you hand over a package in Norfolk, it should be on the bench the next working day.
The work is carried out at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. There is no pickup service, and there is no shop you can walk into in Norwich or anywhere else in Norfolk. Instead, there is a head-swap bench, hardware imagers, a stock of donor drives and the staff who use them, all in one building where the specialist equipment is housed. The trip from Norwich to Cambridge is about an hour and twenty minutes via the A11, or one working day by post, and post is what most people use.
The nearest and the most capable often can't be the same when it comes to failing storage. A drive that clicks needs a head-swap bench, an exact match for a donor drive, plus imaging hardware that will read around damaged areas, and these aren't going to fit into a standard high street unit. Therefore, local computer shops generally pass this type of job on to a lab anyway, with a margin added and a week of your time gone. So searching for data recovery specialists near me is the correct instinct. However, the honest answer is a specialist lab a day's post away, rather than a counter twenty minutes down the road that quietly sends the parcel off.
The other half of it is knowing where you stand quickly. The free diagnostic is completed 2 working days after your media arrives, and it gives you one fixed figure in writing, not an estimate that moves. There is no charge for finding out, and going ahead is entirely your decision.
Most of the everyday work is an HDD: a 3.5 inch disk from a Norwich tower, a 2.5 inch from a laptop, or the one inside an external case that has stopped being seen. They all take the same route in. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Any single hard drive or SSD, including NVMe, is £300 + VAT. Arrays, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT and go up depending on how many disks there are, because we need to image every disk individually. CCTV and DVR recorder disks are £400 + VAT, BitLocker decryption is £400 + VAT, and a full forensic investigation with its written report is £800 + VAT, or £400 + VAT without the report. Don't forget to add VAT to all of these, and check the data recovery cost page to see what sits behind each band.
If the drive is still inside your laptop, desktop or recorder, it has to be removed before it travels, because we take the drive itself and not the whole machine. Any local computer shop will remove the drive at minimal cost. Server and RAID disks also get removed, each labelled by its bay, and NAS disks come out if you can manage it, otherwise send the NAS. From there the usual routes into our lab are hard drive recovery, SSD recovery, NAS recovery, RAID recovery and, for the portable drives Norfolk has plenty of, external drive recovery and LaCie data recovery.
Tracked and insured in, diagnosed free within 2 working days, and the figure written down before any work starts.
Most items arrive at this bench by insured and tracked post. We recommend getting a quote first, either by telephone or using our free online diagnostic, and once you have received your quote, simply post the item. Post is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel sent from Norfolk typically arrives on the bench within a working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? Before sending, remove the hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD), as we do not accept whole units. From a DVR or recorder, send just the disk. From a server or RAID, take out the disks and clearly label each disk by bay number. A network attached storage (NAS) device may be sent as its disks if they can be removed; otherwise please send the NAS itself. There is only one type of drive we are unable to accept: storage soldered onto a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs, extremely thin laptops). In such cases, if the storage cannot be taken out it cannot be accepted. If you are unsure whether you have a removable drive or not, call us before sending anything.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Please mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to travel from Norwich along the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. Otherwise you can post it using a tracked service and we will receive it the following working day. We will contact you as soon as we have your drive and it is booked onto our bench.
If you're unsure of what to include in the box, please call us on 0800 689 0668 before sealing it. Or, for a first view on what we can do, you can use our free online diagnostic.