Data Recovery London

Data recovery starts with working out which kind of problem you actually have, because the two kinds are not remotely alike. A logical failure — deleted files, a formatted card, a corrupted partition, a drive that mounts but shows nothing — leaves the hardware intact and the data usually still physically present. A physical failure — clicking, grinding, a drive that never spins up, an SSD the Mac no longer sees at all — is a hardware problem, and no amount of software will fix it. Diagnosis is free, and we tell you which one you are dealing with before you commit to anything.

Logical recoveries are often done in front of you. We work from a copy wherever we can rather than the original drive, so nothing we do makes the situation worse, and you can see the files reappearing as they are found. Where the drive is healthy enough, this is frequently finished in a single visit and your files come back onto a drive or a machine you already have.

Physical failures are different and we will be straight with you about it. A drive that is clicking or seizing needs specialist facilities, not a technician with recovery software, and every extra attempt to power it up can cost you data that was still recoverable an hour earlier. The single most useful thing you can do is stop using it and unplug it. We tell you honestly what a realistic chance of recovery looks like, and what it would cost, before anything is attempted.

The one promise we will not make is that everything comes back. Nobody can promise that honestly, and a drive with failed storage sometimes simply loses what was on it. What we do promise is that you pay nothing if we recover nothing, that we quote before we start, and that anything we do recover is handed back to you on media you keep — never left sitting on our equipment.