Some archive emails are diagnostic puzzles. This pair are about money — the subject recovery websites are shyest about — and they’ve earned an honest essay in reply. Both reproduced as sent, with one name removed for fairness.
A genuine £799 quote, and the three tests that separate an honest number from a scare tactic.
“My laptop drive failed and I took it to [a high-street chain]. They quoted £799 for data recovery, fixed, before anyone had looked inside it — and said it would be sent away to a partner lab, four to six weeks. That’s more than the laptop cost. Is that just what data recovery costs now? It feels like they priced my desperation rather than the work.”
Today’s answer: your last sentence is the whole analysis. A fixed price before diagnosis can only be set high enough to cover the worst case — so everyone with a simple fault subsidises it — and ‘sent away to a partner’ means the counter takes a margin on work someone else does. Neither is wicked; both are why the number felt wrong. The honest structure runs the other way: diagnose free, then fix the price to the actual fault. On this bench that means a £0 look, single-drive recoveries from £300 + VAT, complex mechanical work priced as the work it is — and a written quote that equals the invoice.
“My gaming PC’s drive is full of bad sectors and getting worse. It’s got 234 games installed plus all my save files and screenshots going back years. The games I can redownload, I suppose, but the saves are irreplaceable. Is recovery even worth paying for when most of the drive is stuff I could get back free?”
Today’s answer: you’ve already done the professional’s triage — separating the replaceable from the irreplaceable — and it changes the job’s shape entirely. A recovery targeted at saves, configs and screenshots is smaller, faster work than resurrecting 234 reinstallable games, and naming those priorities at intake is exactly how quotes stay proportionate. ‘Worth it’ then becomes your equation with real numbers in it: a free diagnostic, a fixed price for the folders that matter, and no fee if they don’t come back. Nobody should pay archive prices to recover a download queue.
Recovery pricing is honest when three things are true. The diagnosis precedes the number — anything else is pricing your fear, as letter one felt in their bones. The number reflects the work — donor parts, bench hours, disk counts — never the data’s emotional value; a lab that asks what your files are worth to you is negotiating, not quoting. And the risk sits with the lab: no fix, no fee makes overpromising unprofitable, which is the only regulator that never sleeps. The full workings live on the cost page; the £799 letter is why that page exists.
If you’re holding a quote that feels like it priced your desperation, get a second number the honest way round. The diagnostic is free, the quote is fixed in writing, and honest advice on 0131 202 0491 costs nothing at all.