Complexity sets the price, not capacity — recovering two terabytes from a healthy drive costs less than twenty gigabytes from one with a seized motor. Here are our actual figures, what moves them, and exactly what no fix, no fee does and does not cover.
The precise figure lands in writing once the free diagnostic is finished — and never ahead of it. Every price on this page excludes VAT.
The single most common misconception about recovery pricing, and the one that makes quotes look arbitrary.
All plus VAT, all confirmed in writing after the free diagnostic.
SD, microSD, CompactFlash and flash drives, including snapped connectors and monolithic packages.
Internal and external hard drives, SATA and NVMe SSDs, and Macs with a removable drive.
Two devices recovered and recombined into the single logical volume they were meant to be.
Every member imaged and the array reconstructed from the copies, whatever the level or controller.
Encrypted volume work with a valid key, and footage carved from proprietary recorder formats.
VMDK and VHDX reconstruction, and write-blocked forensic imaging with a documented chain of custody.
Multi-shelf arrays with pool and LUN metadata to rebuild before any file system appears.
Worth reading the detail, here and anywhere else you are quoted.
Most of our work is no fix, no fee: if the recovery fails you pay nothing. Where a job needs physical drive-level work — opening the drive in clean air, fitting donor parts, controller-level SSD work — we take a 50% deposit up front, with the balance payable only on success. That covers parts and bench time that are spent whatever the outcome.
Three services sit outside no fix, no fee entirely: forensic investigation, CCTV and DVR work, and data destruction. In each case the effort is identical regardless of what is found, and in the forensic case establishing that nothing happened is a legitimate and valuable result. We say so up front rather than in small print.
Not aimed at anyone in particular — these are simply the questions that separate a real quote from a hook.
Will you give me a fixed price in writing before starting? “It depends what we find” is fair before a diagnostic and unreasonable after one. A headline price that rises once the drive has arrived is the commonest complaint in this industry.
Do you charge for the diagnostic? Ours is free and takes up to 48 hours. And what happens if it fails? Establish whether a deposit applies and whether it is refundable. We would also add a fourth: be wary of anyone promising to decrypt modern ransomware or recover a soldered Mac from a dead logic board — nobody can do either, and the promise tells you something about the rest of the quote.
The questions about price that come up the most.
From £250 plus VAT for cards and USB sticks, £300 for single drives, SSDs, laptops and Macs with removable storage, £550 flat for Fusion Drives, from £500 for RAID, NAS and servers, £800 flat for BitLocker and CCTV, and from £1,250 for enterprise SAN.
Barely. Pricing follows the work needed to reach the data, not its volume — recovering 2TB from a healthy drive costs less than 20GB from a drive with a seized motor. Whether the drive must be opened is the biggest single factor.
Yes, and it takes up to 48 hours with no obligation. It establishes what actually failed and produces a fixed written quote. If we find nothing is recoverable, or that you could do the job yourself with software, we tell you and there is nothing to pay.
If the recovery fails you pay nothing. Where physical drive-level work is needed we take a 50% deposit covering parts and bench time, with the balance due only on success. Forensic, CCTV and data destruction work sits outside no-fix-no-fee entirely.
No. The quote is fixed in writing after the diagnostic and does not move afterwards. If something unexpected emerges we come back to you rather than proceeding and invoicing.
Stop using the device as soon as symptoms appear, don’t run recovery software on a drive making noise, and send external units complete with their enclosure. Each of those keeps a job in the cheaper category rather than pushing it into the expensive one.
Begin with a free written diagnostic. We'll pin down exactly what can be brought back and what it'll cost — then the decision is yours. Drop your device in at Oxford, or post it over fully insured.