A town that supplied the North Sea for sixty years and now supplies the wind farms understands kit that has to work in bad weather. When the drive holding the survey data stops, it goes south in a tracked box and comes back readable.
Great Yarmouth jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed written quote before any work begins — no fix, no fee on most recoveries.
Great Yarmouth sends us two quite different sorts of parcel, and often in the same week. One comes off the energy side: NR30 and NR31 contractors working the offshore wind supply chain out of the outer harbour and the O&M bases, with survey laptops, ruggedised externals and project archives that have been round a crew transfer vessel more times than is good for them. Salt, vibration and a drive that lives in a bag are a poor combination, and it shows up as a disc that mounts one day and clicks the next. The other parcel is the town's own: seafront and Golden Mile businesses with tills and camera recorders, guesthouses whose booking machine picks August to die in, Gorleston households with one external drive and twenty years of photographs on it.
Nothing has to be carried anywhere. Wrap the bare drive properly and post it tracked and insured from any counter in town; it reaches the bench the next working day. If your firm already runs a courier account, use it — that stays your booking and your cost, and we simply open whatever turns up. If someone is driving to Cambridgeshire anyway, a device can be handed straight over the desk on any weekday between 9am and 5:30pm at Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD. What we do not do, ever, is collect: there is no van, no pickup and no waiting in.
The diagnostic is free and complete inside 2 working days of the parcel landing. After that you get a phone call, not a portal: the fault named in plain words, an honest view of what comes back, and one fixed written figure that does not move afterwards. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Where a drive has to be opened in clean air or its board rebuilt — impact, motor failure, a soaking, scorching — half the quoted figure is paid before that stage and the rest only on success. Encryption cases — ransomware, CCTV recorders, BitLocker — count as forensic work and are settled in full before we begin, and on ransomware the standing advice never changes: don't pay it.
For a downed business system, label each disc with the bay it came out of, box the set so nothing shifts, and send it insured; don't let anything attempt a rebuild first. That last point is the practical difference between general IT support and data recovery specialists — an array that has been rebuilt over itself is a far harder job than one that was simply switched off. Phones and tablets are outside what we take, and so is any memory soldered permanently onto a logic board — a call to 0800 689 0668 settles any doubt in about a minute, and costs you nothing either. Caister, Bradwell, Hopton, Ormesby, Winterton and the Yare villages all post in on the same footing.
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.