Lynn has been sending things south down the Ouse for eight hundred years, so a padded box on a tracked label is hardly a novelty. Post the drive, and inside two working days of it landing you get the fault named and one written figure.
King's Lynn jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed written quote before any work begins — no fix, no fee on most recoveries.
Hard disc recovery near King's Lynn (Kings Lynn, as it is usually typed) is a phrase people put into a phone at about eleven at night, usually with the drive still plugged in and still making a noise. The honest answer is that nobody in Lynn needs a shop for this, and never really did: data recovery specialists work at a bench with a clean-air cabinet on it and a shelf of donor drives behind it, and none of that belongs on a high street counter. What arrives from PE30 to PE34 has the town's own shape: desktop discs out of the food factories and cold stores on the Hardwick and Nar Ouse estates, where a line printer's records matter more than anyone admits until they vanish; site laptops from the port and the engineering firms that keep the dock cranes and the grain plant honest; tills and camera recorders from the shops around the Tuesday Market Place and the Saturday one; and, most weeks, one external drive holding a family's whole photographic history, bought from a supermarket and asked to last forever.
The route is unglamorous and works. Take the bare disc out if you reasonably can, wrap it so nothing rattles, and send it tracked and insured; from Lynn it reaches the bench the next working day. If you would rather use a courier you already deal with, that is your arrangement to make and pay for, and it makes no odds to us which one. If you happen to be going that way anyway, the A10 runs south and the desk will take a device off you on any weekday between 9am and 5:30pm: Cambridge Data Recovery, Compass House, Vision Park, Chivers Way, Cambridge CB24 9AD, two minutes off the A14 at Junction 32. There is no collection service here and never has been, so nobody is waiting in for a van that isn't coming.
Then the part everybody actually rings about. Finding out what is wrong costs nothing: the free diagnostic finishes inside 2 working days of your parcel arriving, and it ends with a call and one fixed written figure. Logical work — deleted folders, a corrupted file system, a disc that lists everything and opens none of it — runs no fix, no fee, so if the files don't come back there is no bill to argue with. Anything that means opening the drive or working the board (mechanical, electrical, water or fire damage) takes 50% of the quoted figure up front, with the balance only on success. Ransomware, CCTV recorders and BitLocker volumes are classed as forensic work, and that band is settled in full before an engineer starts.
Two things we don't do, said now rather than after you've packed: no phones or tablets at all, and no storage that has been soldered down onto a logic board. If the drive unscrews or unplugs, it is our sort of job; if it is bare chips baked onto a mainboard, it isn't, and we would rather tell you on the phone than by email a week later. Everything else — Downham Market, Hunstanton, Dersingham, Terrington, Walpole, Wisbech's Norfolk edge and the marsh villages out toward the Wash — posts in on exactly the same terms. Freephone 0800 689 0668, answered by people who have opened a few thousand of these.
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.