The number on an EDR quote isn’t plucked from a rate card — it’s built from what your specific recovery requires. This page opens the workings: the cost drivers, the economics of donor parts, and how no-fix-no-fee keeps the risk on our side of the bench.
Your actual number is put in writing once the free diagnostic is done — never guessed at before it.
Mechanics: if heads, motors or boards need replacing, a matched donor drive must be sourced and sacrificed — a real cost that scales with how rare your model is. Depth: firmware repair and chip-level NAND work are hours of specialist engineering; logical recovery on healthy hardware is not. Disk count: a RAID job images every member before array logic begins — four drives is four imaging runs. Urgency: queue-jumping is available and honestly priced as its own line. What deliberately doesn’t drive the number: capacity for its own sake, what the data is worth to you, or how distressed you sound on the phone. The first two would be lazy; the third would be predatory.
On most jobs, payment exists only if your data does. That single term rearranges everything: the diagnostic must be honest (quoting hopeless jobs costs us the bench time), the quote must be realistic (we eat overruns, not you), and the recovery must actually succeed (or the work was free). It also answers the ‘is it worth it?’ question cleanly — with a free diagnostic and success-contingent payment, finding out what your recovery costs risks nothing but postage, and the decision is made with a real number against your data’s real value. The minority of jobs that carry an attempt fee — severe physical damage, forensic work — are flagged in writing before you commit, never discovered after.
When the hardware is healthy and the loss is logical — deleted files, quick format — sometimes yes, and we'll say so on the phone. When the drive clicks, hangs or isn't detected, software is a false economy: it can't reach the fault and its scanning stresses failing mechanics. The free call sorts your case into the right column.
Multiplication, not markup. Every member disk is imaged individually before any array work — that's per-drive bench time — then the array itself is reconstructed virtually and validated. Four to eight drives of careful work is simply more work; the method that makes RAID recovery safe is the method that prices it.
We price the work honestly and let the terms compete: free diagnostic, fixed written quote, in-house engineers, no fix no fee. A cheaper headline that becomes an 'evaluation fee', an outsourced job, or a percentage of your data's value isn't the same product at a lower price — it's a different product.
What comes back from each type of device, and the number it starts at. Follow through to any page for the full pricing detail and device-specific questions.
| Device | From | |
|---|---|---|
| Hard Drive | £300 | details → |
| SSD & NVMe | £300 | details → |
| USB Stick | £250 | details → |
| Memory Card | £250 | details → |
| External HDD | £300 | details → |
| Mac & MacBook | £300 | details → |
| RAID Array | £500 | details → |
| NAS Unit | £500 | details → |
| SAN | £1,250 | details → |
| Server | £500 | details → |
| Database | £500 | details → |
| Laptop & PC | £300 | details → |
| Virtual Machine | £800 | details → |
Nobody should commit money against a guess. That's the whole reason the diagnostic happens first and costs nothing — it turns a guess into a named fault, and the named fault into one fixed number, given to you in writing before a single hour is billed. Approve it or don't; there's no pressure either way. For most jobs, if nothing usable comes back, you owe nothing for the attempt. The exception is deep physical work — drives opened on the bench, CCTV and forensic cases — where specialist hours are spent whether or not the outcome is perfect, so half the fee secures that time upfront and the rest is due only once the data is actually in your hands.
A headline price that undercuts everyone else is usually a door-opener, not a final figure — the real cost tends to surface once your device is already in pieces on someone's bench. The sharper risk isn't the money: a failing drive opened outside proper clean-air conditions, or hammered with recovery software while it's still dying, can lose data permanently before anyone qualified even looks at it. There's rarely a second attempt once that happens. The number worth trusting is the one you get in writing after a real diagnosis, from a lab that does the work itself rather than posting your drive on to someone else.
Skip the ranges above and find out what your specific job costs — free to ask, fixed once you have it, yours to accept or decline.