Mid-Norfolk runs on machinery that gets mended rather than replaced, similar to how we view hard drives. Post it in from Dereham and you will receive an honest account of what failed and one figure to make a decision on.
Dereham jobs are diagnosed free. You will receive a fixed written quote prior to any work being done, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Dereham's parcels tell you what the town does. Agricultural engineering has been the trade in Dereham for more than a century. The workshops on Rashes Green and around the edge of the town keep drawings, parts records and machine data on ordinary PCs that are housed in dusty rooms and switched off at the wall. The farms behind them are worse still, and they know it: one office computer in a converted corner holds movement records, spray diaries, subsidy paperwork and the accounts, backed up (when it is backed up) to an external drive sitting six inches away on the same desk. Add in the market-day traders, the Mid-Norfolk Railway volunteers with their scanned archive, and the NR19 households whose photographs have moved from shoebox to hard disc without anyone noticing the risk, and this is a normal week's post.
There's no need for anything to go on a journey. Get a quote before sending your drive (by phone or using the free online diagnostic). Then pack the bare drive so it can't shift about inside the box, send it tracked and insured, and it will be at the bench the very next working day. If you already use a courier, you may book them yourself to send it; the arrangements and costs are yours, and it makes no difference at our end. If there's going to be a trip to Cambridgeshire anyway, devices are welcome at the desk Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed: Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. We do not collect, and we don't pretend otherwise on any page of this site.
The diagnosis is free, takes up to 2 working days to complete from when the drive arrives, and ends in a single written figure, with the fault named plainly and the odds stated without decoration. On logical faults (deletion, corruption, a disc showing its folders and opening none of them), you only pay if we recover your data. If the drive needs to be taken apart on the head-swap bench, or needs an electronic rebuild after a surge or a soaking, then half of the quote is payable before that stage, and the second half only upon success. All forensic work, including ransomware, camera recorders and BitLocker, is paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote instead.
We do not take any mobile phone or tablet, nor will we accept any drive with memory soldered permanently to a mainboard. Everything else, from a single card out of a combine harvester's monitor through to a small server, starts with a free call to 0800 689 0668. Swaffham, Watton, Mattishall, North Elmham, Litcham, Necton and the mid-Norfolk villages between them all send parcels on exactly the same terms.
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.
Diagnosis costs nothing, a fixed price is written down, and in most cases you will only be charged if we recover your data. Online or by phone.