For years Fakenham has been printing, racing and trading with little fanfare about any of it. When you send us a failed drive by tracked post you receive the same treatment: an honest assessment of the fault, a fixed figure, and no theatrics.
Fakenham jobs are diagnosed free. A fixed written quotation will be given to you prior to commencing any work, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
This is a working market town rather than a picturesque one, and the parcels reflect that. Printing was a real industry here for the best part of a century, and the design, print and sign companies carrying on the trade keep large collections of images and artwork on external hard drives and small network attached storage systems, where if you lose a job file you may also lose your customer's job. Around the printing firms are the estates and farms of north Norfolk, with office computers full of stock records and land data. There are also the racecourse and the event businesses around it, along with the market traders. In addition, there are NR21 households who keep their photographs, scanned certificates and family research on a single disc they bought about ten years ago. The town's old gasworks still stands today because no one ever got round to demolishing it. Many hard drives are kept in service on exactly the same principle.
Whatever the drive, we use the exact same route. First, get a quote, either over the phone or via our free online diagnostic. Next, pack the drive securely enough that nothing will move during transit, then post it tracked and insured, and it will arrive at the bench the very next working day. You are welcome to use your own courier service, as long as you book it and pay for it yourself; it makes no difference to the work. A drive may also be handed over the desk in person, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, without prior arrangement, at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD (just 2 minutes from Junction 32 of the A14), for anyone who happens to be going. We do not come out to collect devices, and no page on this site suggests otherwise.
Once it is here, the diagnostic is free and will take no longer than 2 working days to complete, ending with a single written figure and a straight answer to the question "how likely is it to succeed?". Logical faults (deleted artwork, corrupt volumes, discs displaying folder names but unable to open them) are work where you only pay if we recover your data. When a drive must be opened on the head-swap bench, or its board repaired after physical shock, a surge, water or fire, we require half of the quote before that work and the remaining balance only if the files come back. Forensic-classed jobs, including ransomware, CCTV recorders and BitLocker, are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote.
Phones out, tablets out, and no memory soldered permanently onto a mainboard; that is our whole exclusion list. The freephone will be able to put your device on the correct side of it in about a minute. Walsingham, Wells-next-the-Sea, Little Snoring, Great Ryburgh, Briston and the villages along the Wensum send parcels under the same conditions as the town itself.
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.