It’s the first thing most people ask, and the honest answer is the one nobody likes: it depends. Not as a dodge — because “data recovery” covers everything from undeleting a file in an afternoon to rebuilding a failed twelve-disk array over a fortnight, and quoting a single number for all of it would be a lie. What we can do is tell you which bracket your case falls into, and roughly what each one takes. Here’s the realistic breakdown.
The diagnostic is quick either way. It’s the recovery itself that varies — and the variation is mostly about whether the drive needs physical repair first.
Whatever the eventual timeline, the start is fast. Once a drive is in front of us, the free diagnostic — establishing what’s actually wrong and what’s recoverable — is usually done within a working day of arrival, and you get a fixed written quote off the back of it. So even for the most complex job, you’re not left wondering for a week: within roughly 24 to 48 hours of the drive reaching the bench you’ll know the diagnosis, the odds and the price. If you’ve posted the drive in from elsewhere in Scotland, add a day of transit at the front. Nothing beyond the diagnostic starts until you approve the quote, so the recovery clock proper only begins when you say go.
The majority of recoveries — an accidentally deleted or formatted drive that’s otherwise healthy, or a single hard drive with a straightforward fault — land in the two-to-five working day range from the point you approve the quote. The bulk of that time isn’t someone hovering over the drive; it’s the imaging. A failing drive has to be cloned sector by sector, gently, and a drive with bad areas is read slowly and patiently so nothing is lost — a large disk that’s struggling can take a day or more just to image properly, and rushing that stage is exactly how data gets lost. Once there’s a good image, rebuilding the file system and extracting your files is comparatively quick. So a logical recovery might be back in a couple of days; a healthy-but-struggling hard drive, a few more.
Some cases genuinely take longer, and it’s worth knowing why so a two-week estimate doesn’t sound like foot-dragging. A drive with failed heads needs a clean-air parts transplant before it can be read at all, and matching donor parts sometimes have to be sourced — that alone can add days. A RAID array or NAS means imaging several disks and then reconstructing the array’s layout virtually before a single file appears, which multiplies the work. Chip-off recovery from a dead memory card or phone, where the memory is read directly, is painstaking. And any drive that’s badly physically damaged — water or fire, a bad fall — needs careful restoration first. These are the one-to-two-week jobs, occasionally longer if parts or the sheer size of the data demand it.
A few things genuinely change the timeline, and most of them are about the drive rather than us. The single biggest accelerant is how healthy the drive still is: a disk that images cleanly on the first pass is far quicker than one that surrenders a few sectors at a time and needs multiple gentle passes. Capacity matters — a full 8TB drive simply takes longer to read than a half-empty 500GB one. Whether physical repair is needed is the big fork in the road. And, bluntly, how soon you stopped using the drive after it failed: a drive that was powered down promptly is usually in better shape than one that was pushed through repair attempts, which can turn a clean job into a slow one. The free diagnostic is what pins your case to a real number rather than this general range.
Sometimes days aren’t an option — a business is down, a deadline is immovable, a wedding is on Saturday. For those, an emergency service exists: the job jumps the queue and is worked continuously rather than in the normal rotation, and straightforward cases can often turn around same-day or overnight once the drive is here. It costs more, because it means dropping other work, and it can’t rewrite physics — a clean-room head swap still takes as long as it takes — but for a recoverable drive under real time pressure it can compress days into hours. If that’s your situation, say so at the outset and we’ll tell you honestly what’s achievable rather than what you want to hear. Either way, it starts the same place: a free diagnostic, in person at the Princes Street lab or posted in from anywhere in Scotland.