Recovery marketing runs on ‘anything is possible’. Physics disagrees, in five specific places — and publishing them serves you twice: you’ll grieve the genuinely gone faster, and you’ll recognise instantly any lab that quotes you for one of them. Because a service that will invoice against physics will improvise against everything else.
Overwritten data, keyless encryption, TRIMmed deletions — and why naming them protects you from worse labs.
1. Truly overwritten data. Once new bytes occupy the sectors, the old bytes aren’t hiding beneath — magnetic-residue recovery of overwritten regions is forensic mythology on modern drives. Partial overwrites leave partial survivors; full ones don’t. 2. A wallet with no keys anywhere. No seed phrase, no private key, no wallet file on any surviving medium — the mathematics that made the coins yours makes them exactly that gone. 3. BitLocker without any key. No recovery key in any account, no password, no escrow: the encryption is doing precisely its job, against everyone. 4. Cleanly TRIMmed SSD deletions. The drive itself erased the cells, minutes after you deleted — exceptions exist and get checked free, but the rule is the rule. 5. Ground-away platter surface. Where a head crash has physically removed the magnetic coating, the data isn’t encoded in anything any more; recovery maps around such wounds, never through them.
A lab gains nothing from false hope except one dishonest invoice and a furious former customer — while the alternative compounds: every free ‘no’ that proves correct is why the paid ‘yes’ gets believed. That’s the entire logic of the free diagnostic with honest verdicts: on this bench, the impossible cases cost you nothing because naming them accurately is the product. It’s also why the wallet page leads with warnings about the field’s predators and the SSD page opens with TRIM’s bad news — honesty placed where the desperate will find it before the dishonest do.
Five impossibles cast a useful shadow: everything not on the list is a real conversation. Drives declared dead by shops, arrays wrecked by rebuilds, chips inside snapped cards, firmware-locked SSDs, drowned electronics, encrypted drives with a findable key — the case files are eleven documented arguments against premature grief. The skill worth having isn’t optimism or pessimism; it’s knowing which list your disaster is on — and that question, at least, is always answered free.
Not sure which list yours is on? That’s exactly what the free verdict is for. The diagnostic is free, the quote is fixed in writing, and honest advice on 0131 202 0491 costs nothing at all.