Frequently Asked Questions

What is your data recovery process?

1. Contact

The first step is to Contact us, we will discuss your recovery requirements and explain how to get your item over to us by post or in person. If required, we can arrange for a courier to collect your item from your home or place of work and this will be delivered directly to us the next working day for immediate attention. There is a charge of £10-£20 (depending on location) for us to arrange this for you.

Wherever you live in the UK, simply request a collection and we will contact you, talk you through the process and make all of the necessary arrangements.

If your data is important to you, we would strongly recommend against attempting to recover the data yourself, as this could potentially cause further damage to the device and greatly reduce the chances of successful data recovery.

2. Diagnosis

On receipt of your failed device we will analyse the extent of the damage and outline a recovery plan for the retrieval of your data, in most cases within 24 hours of receipt of your failed device.

We will then provide you with a confirmed diagnosis and firm quotation by email of the costs and processes involved to attempt the recovery of your data - on a no obligation basis.

This service is completely free, so if you decide not to continue with recovery we will return your drive to you (a return shipping fee will apply), or if you no longer need the drive, we can dispose of it securely for you.

3. Recovery

Once we have received your agreement to our quotation, we commence the data recovery process. When the repair and eventual recovery is complete, a full file listing will be sent to you for approval, so that you can see what we have recovered from your device.

Once you approved the content of the file listing, the data is then transferred onto your preferred method of storage media; the size and type will usually depend on the amount of data recovered. In most cases this will be a new (branded) external hard drive, which can be provided by us at cost or supplied by you, the choice is yours.

4. Return

Once our engineers are happy that the data recovery process is complete and correct, and you have agreed a full file listing of recovered items, we will contact you to arrange for your information to be returned to you either by Royal Mail Special Delivery or our designated courier service. Unless otherwise instructed, we will encrypt your media for security purposes in transit. For small amounts of data, we can send this to you by secure file sharing.

About Data Storage

What is data storage?

Every time you use your computer or laptop, the emails you type, websites you browse, music you download and documents you create will be stored (if saved correctly) on your hard drive or storage device as 'data'.

On the next occasion you switch on your computer or insert your storage device, these saved and stored items will be accessible for you to use again.

What is Data Recovery?

In the event that your device fails or is damaged however, all of your information will become ‘invisible’ or what is generally referred to as ‘lost’. This can be due to many reasons but is at best inconvenient and at worst, extremely distressing.

Data Recovery is the term given to the process of retrieving ‘lost’ data from damaged, failed or corrupted hard drives. The most common scenarios are operating system failure, disk-level/media failure or accidental or even malicious deletion.

How does data storage work?

Hard disk drives are data storage devices used for the storage and retrieval of digitally encoded data, typically using one or more rapidly rotating disks or ‘platters’ that are treated with magnetic coating or material. The disk platters are read with heads that are positioned on an actuator or arm.

These read / write heads read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is typically accessed in what is known as a random access manner, which means that individual data blocks can be stored or retrieved in any order rather than in sequence.

What are hard disk drives?

Hard disk drives are termed as permanent storage, as the data is retained even when power is removed completely from the drive. The two most common types or ‘Form Factors’ that are in use for modern computers and Laptops are the 3.5” Form Factor for desktop computers, and the 2.5” Form Factor which are typically found in smaller devices such as laptop and other portable computers where size is a limiting factor.

All of these hard disk drives are connected to their host systems by one of a number of standard interfaces such as PATA (Parallel ATA) SATA (Serial ATA), SCSI (Small computer Systems Interface) or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

General FAQs

Hard Disk Failure Causes

Hard disks and Storage Media fail for many reasons and they are generally universal to desktops, laptops and removable storage devices.

See our list of some of the common hard disk failure causes. This list covers the causes for the majority of cases we have dealt with.

How Long Will I Have To Wait?

For those drives which do not require physical “surgery”, we are able to handle most cases within 48 hours.

We have experienced occasions when parts of the hard drive are critically damaged, which holds the process up but this is not commonplace.

What Data Do I Get Back?

Our aim is to recover all the data possible from your failed hard drive, everytime. We always send out a full file listing for you to inspect before we return your data to you, so you can check that all the vital information you are looking for has been recovered.

Our pricing structure, unlike others, does not charge per GB of data and as we have to undertake the complete recovery process whether you need one file or 300 files, we feel this is the fairest way to operate.

How Do I Pay?

Our preferred method of payment collection is by Faster Option direct bank transfer/BACS, and our account details will be provided for you at payment stage. We can also accept payment by credit/debit card over the phone or if you are local to us, you can use our secure chip and pin machine in the office when you collect your data.

We can accommodate cheque payments but please note, we are unable to dispatch the data back to you until payment has cleared.

FAQs

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