From the Fens and King's Lynn across to the coast at Cromer and Yarmouth, by way of the Broads, the Breckland pines and every market town on the A11 and A47. Norfolk sends its failed drives to one bench by tracked post, and the diagnostic that names the fault costs nothing.
Same prices in every Norfolk postcode. One drive or SSD £300 + VAT, arrays from £500 + VAT — after a free diagnostic that takes 2 working days from arrival.
Norfolk is a wide county with a small number of roads across it, and the work that arrives changes with the part it came from. Six patterns cover most of a normal week.
Accounts, spray records, herd data and twenty years of correspondence on one tower under a desk, backed up to a single external drive sitting beside it. Both copies are the same age and in the same room, which is how one failure manages to take out both.
Along the north coast and out at the harbours, damp salty air works on connectors and circuit boards for years before the mechanism has anything to say. Drives from within sight of the sea often fail electrically first, which is not the worst way for a drive to fail.
Boatyards, moorings, holiday lets and village practices keep bookings, footage and accounts on a two-bay or four-bay unit tucked somewhere with no airflow. Heat shortens disks, and when one member goes the whole share disappears off the network at once.
Machines that commute daily take the knocks that go with it: a bag set down hard on a station platform, a lid closed on a drive still spinning, a boot lid slammed on a laptop in a case. Dropped 2.5-inch disks are steady work here.
Wedding and landscape photographers, holiday-park traders and drone operators fill cards faster than they empty them. A card that suddenly reads as blank is flash work at £250 + VAT and frequently one of the quicker jobs on the bench.
A great many Norfolk businesses hold their entire trading history on a single small server or RAID box in a back room. When it drops off the network the disk count sets the figure, and every member is imaged before anything is put back together.
Each town has its own page with local detail on it, and King's Lynn (often typed Kings Lynn) sits at the far west of the set. Norwich itself is the home page. Villages in between belong to whichever of these is nearest, and the service is identical wherever the parcel starts.
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.
Norfolk covers something over two thousand square miles and the roads reflect it: the A11 down the spine to Thetford and Cambridge, the A47 running east to west from Yarmouth through Norwich and Dereham to King's Lynn, and a great many miles of lane either side of both. No lab that is genuinely equipped sits within twenty minutes of all of that, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. So the media travels instead. Media is posted to us, tracked and insured, or sent with a courier you book and pay for yourself, and a parcel handed over in Norfolk is normally on the bench the next working day.
Work is done at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. There is no collection service, and no shop to walk into in Norwich or anywhere else in the county. What there is instead is a clean bench, hardware imagers, a stock of donor drives and the people who use them, all in one building where the specialist tooling lives. From Norwich that is about an hour and twenty down the A11, or one working day in the post, and the post is what nearly everybody uses.
Nearest and ablest are rarely the same thing with failed storage. A drive that clicks needs a filtered clean bench, a matching donor and imaging hardware that reads around bad sectors; those three things do not live in a high street unit, which is why local computer shops generally send the job on to a lab anyway, with a margin added and a week of your time gone. Searching for data recovery specialists near me is the right instinct, and the honest version of the answer is a specialist lab a day away by post rather than a counter twenty minutes away that quietly forwards the parcel.
The other half of it is knowing where you stand quickly. The free diagnostic is finished 2 working days after your media arrives, and it produces one fixed figure in writing, not an estimate that moves. Nothing is chargeable for finding out, and going ahead is entirely your decision.
The everyday job is an HDD: a 3.5-inch disk out of a Norwich tower, a 2.5-inch out of a laptop, or the drive inside an external case that stopped being seen. All of it takes the same route in. Cards and USB pen drives are £250 + VAT. Any single hard drive or SSD is £300 + VAT, NVMe included. Arrays, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 + VAT and rise with the disk count, since every member is imaged in its own right. CCTV and DVR recorder disks are £400 + VAT, BitLocker decryption is £400 + VAT, and a forensic investigation with its written report is £800 + VAT, or £400 + VAT without the report. Add VAT to all of them, and see the data recovery cost page for what sits behind each band.
Where the drive is still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, server or recorder, it needs to come out before it travels, and any computer shop in your town will do that for very little. From there the usual routes into the lab are hard drive recovery, SSD recovery, NAS recovery, RAID recovery and, for the portable drives Norfolk owns in quantity, 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 of what reaches this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the steadiest way to move a poorly drive, and a parcel posted in Norfolk is usually on the bench the next working day.
Is the drive still bolted inside a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR recorder? The hard drive or SSD needs to come out first, and only the bare drive travels — taking drives out of machines is not something we do here. Storage soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, one or two very thin laptops) is the single thing beyond us: if it will not come out, it cannot come in.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Mark the parcel for the attention of Cambridge Data Recovery. From Norwich it is about an hour and twenty down the A11, then two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32 — or next working day by tracked post. You hear from us as soon as it is booked onto the bench.
Unsure what to put in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or run the free online diagnostic.