Fakenham has printed, raced and traded for a long time without making a fuss about any of it. Send a failed drive down by tracked post and you get the same treatment: an honest fault, a fixed figure, no theatre.
Fakenham jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed written quote before any work begins — no fix, no fee on most recoveries.
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 firms that carry on the trade run big image and artwork archives on external drives and small NAS boxes, where losing a job file means losing a customer's job. Around them sit the estates and farms of north Norfolk with their office PCs full of stock records and land data, the racecourse and the event businesses around it, the market traders, and NR21 households whose photographs, scanned certificates and family research all live on one disc bought a decade ago. The town's old gasworks survived because nobody got round to demolishing it; a good many hard drives are kept in service on exactly the same principle.
Whatever the drive, the route is the same. Wrap it so nothing can move, post it tracked and insured, and it lands at the bench the next working day. Use your own courier if you have one — you book it and you pay for it, and it makes no difference to the work. A device can also be handed over the desk on any weekday between 9am and 5:30pm, at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32, for anyone who happens to be going. We do not collect, and no page on this site suggests otherwise.
Once it is here the diagnostic is free and finished inside 2 working days, and it produces one written figure and a straight answer about the odds. Logical faults — deleted artwork, a corrupted volume, a disc that lists its folders and opens none of them — run no fix, no fee. Where the drive has to be opened in clean air or its board repaired after impact, a surge, water or fire, half the quote is paid before that work and the balance only if the files come back. Forensic-classed jobs, which means ransomware, CCTV recorders and BitLocker, are paid in full before anything starts.
Phones out, tablets out, and no memory soldered permanently onto a mainboard — that's the whole exclusion list, and the freephone will place your device on the right side of it in a minute. Walsingham, Wells-next-the-Sea, Little Snoring, Great Ryburgh, Briston and the villages along the Wensum send parcels on the same terms as the town itself.
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.
Diagnosis costs nothing, the figure is written down, and most jobs carry no fix no fee. Online or by phone.