// coventry · warwickshire · every band printed, nothing collected

Data Recovery Coventry

Cards, sticks, hard disks, SSDs, NVMe blades, NAS boxes, arrays and servers — all of it recovered by tracked post for Coventry and Warwickshire.

A tower that has taken to clicking instead of spinning up. An M.2 blade the BIOS listed on Monday and had forgotten by Tuesday. A four-bay box that shed its second disk during a rebuild, on the one morning the office could least afford it. A card back from a weekend booking that now claims to be empty. Not one of those is a rare parcel here, and most of them are a long way from finished. Working out what can still be read is free. Where there is a job worth doing, you have the figure in writing before anything is opened.

No charge for the diagnosis, in any band £300 + VAT a disk, an SSD or a blade Written quote, settled before work starts Tracked post in from every Warwickshire address
// the whole thing in a paragraph

The answer is free. Only the work is charged for.

Coventry jobs nearly all take one shape. Your media goes down the M40 to the Oxford bench, you hear what can be read back and what that would cost, and the decision then sits with you for as long as you want to leave it there.

2 working daysfrom booking-in to your answer
£300 + VATa single disk, SSD or M.2 blade
Nothingowed when a logical job comes back empty
55 milesof M40, or one tracked parcel

Finding out is free, and the quote that follows is what you pay. The bands are printed here rather than kept back for the telephone: £250 + VAT a card or stick, £300 + VAT a disk or SSD, £400 + VAT a recorder disk or an encrypted volume, from £500 + VAT an array. The whole table sits on the data recovery cost page, and if you are reading this from well outside the county, data recovery services describes the same bench as a national postal service.

// what arrives in the boxes

One bench, and every way storage gives up

Work is not ranked here by how impressive it looks. A pen drive snapped off in a laptop socket and a shelf of SAS disks out of a rack get the same order of operations and the same attention paid to them. Nothing is priced before somebody has had the media in their hands, and one service then covers all of it: folders deleted in error, volumes that now read as gibberish, drives that met a concrete floor, circuit boards taken out by a surge on the mains, platters that no longer turn. Pick the nearest thing to yours from the grid, or ring and describe it in whatever words you have. Whoever answers has been reading these symptoms for years and is not working from a script.

Hard Drive

A computer that no longer lists its disk is nearly always sitting beside a disk that…

SSD

There is nothing to listen for. A solid state drive that has failed presents exactly as…

NVMe

Nothing else in a computer stops this cleanly. There is no noise to catch and no…

Memory Card

Card work is the steadiest thing on this bench and very little of it is holiday snaps.…

USB Stick / Flash Drive

A finished dissertation, a quarter of payroll, the only copy of the books, and every…

Laptop

These arrive at the worst hour available. A machine gives up on the morning something…

Desktop Computer

Under a desk in most houses there is a tower holding every photograph the family owns,…

Apple iMac

A grey screen and nothing after it. A question mark folder blinking in the middle of…

Apple MacBook

MacBooks tend to bow out quietly. The charger stops being acknowledged, or a lid closes…

External Drive

The drive knocked off a desk is always the one holding the only copy. Portable units,…

NAS External Drive

The box on the shelf hums away for years, and somewhere along the line it quietly…

CCTV / DVR

The cameras did what they were installed to do. Then the recorder gave up, or the loop…

RAID Array

Nobody had looked at the alert panel in months, so the first failure went unremarked…

SAN

Shared storage fails in a way that is hard to miss: the moment it stops, everything…

Ransomware

Filenames ending in something nobody has seen before, and a text file in every…

BitLocker Drives

A recovery screen asking for forty-eight digits, and a household or an office where…

Forensic Recovery

A machine handed back at the end of a notice period looks noticeably emptier than…

// the shape of a job

Four stages, from the first telephone call to the files back

step 01

Describe what it is doing

Ring 0800 689 0668, or let the diagnostic form ask the questions instead. Everyday words are fine — describe it the way you would to a neighbour. Nobody is marking your vocabulary.

step 02

Send it down the M40

Tracked and insured from any address in the county, it reaches the bench the next working day. Driving is fifty-five miles, and reception takes devices over the counter in office hours. Nobody collects.

step 03

The free diagnosis

Two working days after booking-in you learn what has failed, get a straight reading of the odds, and receive one price that does not move again later.

step 04

The files come home

Agree, and what has been recovered travels back on an encrypted drive, usually two to four working days for a single disk. Decline, and your media is posted back.

// getting your media to Oxford

Posting a device in — what goes in the box

Almost everything worked on here arrived in the post. A drive that is already in trouble has an easier time boxed, padded and insured than it does being carried round in a bag for an afternoon, and a parcel handed over in Coventry today is normally booked in at Oxford tomorrow morning.

As a rule the storage comes out and the machine stays where it is. That applies to a laptop, a tower, an iMac and to the recorder sitting under a counter. Taking equipment apart is not something this bench does, and a repair shop will free a drive in a few minutes. Two things go the other way: an external drive stays sealed inside its own case, and a NAS travels as a complete unit with its disks still in their bays. A Fusion Mac is a third case — both of its drives come out and travel together, each one labelled. The single situation nobody can work around is memory soldered flat onto a mainboard, which is how Apple Silicon Macs and a good many slim laptops are built: if the storage will not unbolt, there is no parcel to send.

  • Use a box or padded mailer with some rigidity to it, and pack around the drive until nothing shifts when the parcel is tilted. Mains adaptors, docks and leads are not wanted at this end.
  • Sending a RAID or a server? Only the member disks travel — not the chassis, not the controller — and each one wants its bay number written on it. Take a photograph of the front of the unit before anything is pulled; it costs nothing and now and again it saves a day.
  • Print the shipping and booking-in form (PDF), add a name, a number you will answer and a sentence on how the trouble began, and drop it in beside the media.
  • Most people use Special Delivery, which is tracked and covered; a courier of your own does the same job. You can also bring it: the Oxford reception takes devices over the counter, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Neither a Coventry counter nor a collection round exists.
// write this on the label

Oxford Data Recovery

John Eccles House
Oxford Science Park
Robert Robinson Avenue
Littlemore, Oxford, OX4 4GP

↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)

Put Oxford Data Recovery on the label. From Coventry it is roughly fifty-five miles straight down the M40, about an hour if you would rather drive it in than post it. Either way you are told the moment it is logged, and the free diagnostic finishes two working days later.

Unsure what ought to go in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you seal it, or work through the free online diagnostic and let it do the asking.

// what customers say

Jobs that ended well

★★★★★

"Eleven years of job files were on one external drive and it stopped appearing on a Friday afternoon. Posted Monday, priced Wednesday, and back on a new drive before the week was out. Nobody tried to sell me anything I had not asked for."

Rachel M · Nuneaton
★★★★★

"Our QNAP lost one disk and then lost another while it was rebuilding, and the company we pay for IT support stopped picking up the phone. Every disk was copied first, the volume was assembled from the copies, and nine years of drawings came out whole. Plain answers from the first call onwards."

Dave H · Rugby
★★★★★

"My daughter's laptop went under a chair leg a fortnight before her hand-in, and a shop pronounced the disk scrap. It was nothing of the sort. The drive came out, the dissertation came off it, and the bill matched the figure I had agreed in writing to the penny."

Priya S · Leamington Spa
// frequently asked questions

Questions we get asked

Nothing at all until you have a figure in front of you and have agreed to it. The diagnostic is free in every category, it finishes 2 working days after the media is booked in, and it produces one price in writing that then holds for the rest of the job. There are five bands and no sixth. Flash media — a memory card of any size, a pen drive, a USB stick — is £250 + VAT. A single hard disk or SSD is £300 + VAT, and an NVMe blade counts as one drive rather than as something exotic. Two jobs share the £400 + VAT band: a disk pulled out of a CCTV or DVR recorder, and any drive carrying BitLocker or another full-disk encryption. Multi-disk work — RAID, NAS, SAN, the disks out of a server — begins at £500 + VAT and moves with how many members there are, because each one is imaged before the set can be put back together. Forensic work is quoted two ways: £800 + VAT buys a full investigation with a written report, while £400 + VAT buys the binary image and the deleted-file extraction on their own. Ransomware belongs in the ordinary media bands, so one encrypted disk is £300 + VAT and an encrypted array is from £500 + VAT. Logical jobs are no fix, no fee. Four things sit outside that guarantee — electronic and mechanical failures, chip-level work, DVR jobs and forensic work — and anything physical is invoiced half at the start, with the remainder when your files are ready to travel.
There is not, and it is worth knowing before you spend a morning on the ring road looking. No counter in the city centre, nothing at Ansty or Whitley, no engineer in a van, no collection round. One bench does the work, and it is at Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford, OX4 4GP. Coventry to that door is about fifty-five miles of M40 and roughly an hour when the road behaves. Reception there will take a device over the counter on any weekday between 9:00am and 5:30pm, so driving it down is a real option rather than a courtesy. Funding one properly equipped laboratory instead of a row of shop fronts is a large part of why a single disk is still £300 + VAT.
Nuneaton, Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam each have a page here, and boxes come in from all of them. Research and coursework disks arrive from Coventry University and from the Warwick campus out at Gibbet Hill; drawings and tooling files come off the motor engineering at Whitley and Gaydon; ledgers and job files arrive from the units at Ansty and the distribution parks along the M6. Trailing a failing drive round three computer shops first rarely helps, as most of them would only post it on to a laboratory themselves and add their own handling days to yours. One tracked parcel has the media on the bench the next working day, and a sick drive arrives in far better shape boxed and padded than it does rattling about in a bag. One thing to state plainly: phones and tablets are not taken in at all, so no price is ever quoted for either.
Use a carton stiff enough to survive something heavy being set on it, pack around the drive until nothing shifts as you tilt the box, and drop in a sheet of paper carrying your name, a number you will pick up and a sentence on how the trouble began. Special Delivery takes it tracked and insured to Oxford Data Recovery, John Eccles House, Oxford Science Park, Robert Robinson Avenue, Littlemore, Oxford, OX4 4GP, and your own courier account does the job just as well. What travels is the storage on its own; the machine it came out of stays at home. That means unbolting the disk from a laptop, a tower, an iMac or the recorder in the stockroom before anything is packed. Three things are exempt. An external drive is left sealed in its own enclosure and posted exactly as it is. A NAS goes whole, disks still seated in their bays. A Fusion Mac has two drives and both are wanted, each labelled so the pair can be matched again. RAID sets and servers invert the rule once more: member disks only, no chassis and no controller, with the bay position written on each disk and a photograph taken of the front of the unit before the first one is pulled. Nobody collects from Coventry. You post it, or you hand it in at Oxford during office hours, and word reaches you the moment it is logged. The one situation nobody can work around is storage soldered flat onto a mainboard, because there is then nothing to unbolt and nothing to send.
Weekly, and RAID 0 turns up at this address more than at any other in the network — two or four disks striped for speed, nothing duplicated anywhere in the set, and one missing member enough to take the volume down with it. Whatever the level, each disk is copied on its own before anything is assembled, so nothing at all is written back to what you posted. The geometry is then recovered from those copies: which disk opened the stripe, how large the blocks were, which way the parity rotates. Nobody experiments on the live box to find out. Losing one disk out of a RAID 5 and losing a second one during the rebuild are separate problems carrying separate odds, and you will be told which of the two has arrived. Multi-disk work opens at £500 + VAT and rises with the member count. Number the disks by bay before they come out, post the disks alone, and above all stop the box attempting another rebuild — more ordinary jobs are made difficult by that one step than by anything else people do.
No. Nothing here is sold on subscription: no backup contracts, no cloud storage, no monthly anything. This is a bench that gets files off failed storage and hands them back. Most Coventry firms searching for disaster recovery are searching because a server has already stopped, which makes the job in front of them a recovery, priced on hardware like any other — £300 + VAT for a single disk, from £500 + VAT for an array. What survives comes back on an encrypted drive, and the sensible next move is a routine rather than a full stop: keep anything that matters in three places, on two kinds of media, with one of those somewhere other than the building the original sat in.
Yes, and a good part of most weeks is exactly that work. Anything urgent is flagged before the parcel arrives and its diagnostic is lifted to the head of the queue — the server that stopped overnight, the box behind a shared drive, an array that lost a second member during its rebuild, a design workstation with a delivery date on it. A company disk is charged from the same printed table as a household one, £300 + VAT for a single drive and from £500 + VAT for an array, and urgency adds nothing to either figure. The clock is not moved to flatter it either: two working days from booking-in to the diagnosis, then two to four for a finished single-drive job once you have said yes.
// the ground this covers

The city first, then out across Warwickshire

Begin in Coventry — the centre around the two cathedrals and the ruins, Far Gosford Street and the university quarter, Earlsdon and Cheylesmore, the estates strung between the M6 and the M69, Whitley and the engineering that has always sat behind the motor trade — and then work outwards. Nuneaton and Bedworth on the old mining belt, Rugby with its cement works and its engineering firms, Leamington Spa and the games studios that have grown up around it, then Warwick, Kenilworth, Southam, Atherstone, Solihull, and Stratford-upon-Avon with the tourism trade behind it. Everything moves on tracked next-day post, so a parcel handed in at a counter in Atherstone is dealt with no differently from one posted in the city centre, and a firm whose server has died can start the job five minutes from its own front door rather than lose half a day to the motorway. Where an entire office has gone down, ten minutes on the disaster recovery page are ten minutes well used. Every town has a page of its own, gathered on data recovery Warwickshire.

Plenty of enquiries already know precisely what has happened. These pages start at the fault rather than at the hardware, and the first of them, data recovery services, is this page rewritten for readers well beyond the county boundary:

Storage stopped? That is rarely where it ends.

The diagnosis costs nothing, one written figure follows it, and £300 + VAT covers any single drive or SSD.