Cost of Recovery

In most cases the cost of recovering data will be less than £100.
This includes scanning the recovered files for viruses & trojans - it might have been a virus that crashed your computer, you don't want it back!

But there are some rather tricky situations, which may lead to additional expense:

RAID
Usage of RAID has become more common, as many PCs sold recently have SATA Controllers which allow RAID arrays to be set up.

The most difficult problem arises with RAID 0 (Stripe).
In simple terms, each file is split between the hard drives, with one drive holding some pieces of the file, and the other drive(s) holding the rest. So if a drive fails, you have a really big problem – just pieces of each file, with no complete files.
Even so, we have been able to successfully recover data from RAID 0 arrays.

RAID 1 (Mirror) and RAID 5 (Striping with Redundancy) are the other commonly-occurring types.
In both these types of RAID, your data should always be recoverable provided that only one drive has been damaged.
In the case of RAID 5, recovery can be fairly time-consuming, therefore expensive.


Hard Drive Physically Damaged
If a hard drive needs to be taken apart and repaired, this must be done in a specially clean environment, where no particles of dust are present. This greatly adds to the cost.


Some Laptop Designs
Laptop designs vary considerably, and some of them require partial or complete disassembly to gain access to the hard drive. This will make data recovery more expensive, if the hard drive needs to be removed (which is not always the case).


No Data - No Fee (Exceptions)
 Normally our policy is not to charge a fee when data cannot be recovered.
In some cases, where it would not be worth our while to proceed on this basis, we may ask you whether you are prepared to pay expenses even if data is not recovered.
If your data is valuable enough, it seems reasonable to offer you this deal, rather than simply refuse to attempt a very difficult data recovery.