The number on an LDR 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.
For most people in Leeds the honest answer is one of three numbers, because the price follows the device, not the drama. A memory card or USB stick is £250 + VAT. A single hard drive or SSD — internal or external, laptop or desktop — is £300 + VAT. A RAID array, NAS box or server starts at £500 + VAT and is quoted to the job, because multi-disk work is genuinely more work. Every one of those starts with a free diagnostic and a fixed figure in writing, and on most single-device jobs there’s nothing to pay unless the recovery succeeds. No hourly meter, no bill that balloons once your drive is open.
Those are the bands that cover the overwhelming majority of jobs. The exceptions — a badly burnt board, chip-level work on a snapped card, a large multi-disk rebuild — sit higher, and you’ll always know the exact figure before a single sector is touched.
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.
People often search for a data recovery cost per GB, and it’s worth explaining why you won’t find one here. Charging by the gigabyte punishes you for the size of your drive rather than the work involved — and the work is almost identical whether we recover 50GB or 5TB from the same failed disk. The same head swap, the same imaging pass, the same file-system rebuild. A per-GB model also creates a nasty incentive: the more we recover, the more you pay, which is exactly backwards. We price by device and difficulty instead, so a full 4TB drive and a half-empty 500GB one in the same condition cost the same to recover. If another Leeds firm quotes you per gigabyte, ask them what a full drive would come to before you commit — the total is often far higher than a flat device price.
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.
£300 + VAT, fixed. That covers internal and external drives, laptop and desktop, whatever the fault turns out to be — with a free diagnostic first and, on most jobs, nothing to pay unless the recovery succeeds.
Yes — genuinely free, not free-then-invoiced. We assess the device, tell you what’s wrong and what’s recoverable, and put a fixed figure in writing. If you decide not to proceed, you owe nothing beyond any return postage.
On most single-device jobs, no — no recovery, no fee. The exceptions are stated in writing before work starts: typically drives previously opened outside a suitable controlled environment, and some multi-disk or chip-level jobs where the attempt itself is the work. You’ll never discover an exception after the fact.
Because you’re paying for what software can’t do: donor parts matched to your exact drive, hours of careful imaging on hardware built to read failing media gently, and chip-level equipment for the cases with no other route. A cheap utility is fine on a healthy drive — on a failing one it’s often the most expensive thing you can run.
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 → |
A fixed £300 + VAT — internal or external, laptop or desktop, clicking or simply not detected. The diagnostic is free, the figure is confirmed in writing before any work, and on most jobs you pay nothing unless the recovery succeeds. Post the drive in from anywhere in the UK or drop it at our Leeds address.
The same £300 + VAT band as an internal drive. That includes the bridge-board faults common on WD, Seagate and LaCie externals — where the enclosure has died rather than the disk, which is more often than people fear.
£300 + VAT for standard Mac and MacBook drives, Fusion Drives and APFS volumes. Soldered-storage Apple Silicon boards are the exception band — genuinely chip-level work — and are quoted individually after the free diagnostic, before you commit to anything.
£300 + VAT for SATA, M.2 and NVMe SSDs, including dead controllers. Monolith and chip-off work sits in the exceptions band and is always priced in writing first.
From £500 + VAT, quoted to the job — every member disk of a RAID array or NAS is imaged individually before the array is rebuilt virtually, so the price follows the number of disks and the state they arrive in.
£250 + VAT for USB sticks and SD, microSD and CF cards. Snapped connectors and cards asking to be formatted both live here; chip-level monolith recovery is the exception band, quoted first.
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.
The cheapest data recovery service, honestly costed, is the one that diagnoses for free, fixes the price in writing, and charges nothing when it fails — because the expensive outcomes in this trade are the hidden ones: the “free” quote that becomes an evaluation fee, the cheap software run over a clicking drive that turns a £300 recovery into an impossible one, the low headline that climbs once your disk is open. Our numbers are the ones on this page, and they don’t move after the fact.
And you don’t need to be in Leeds to use them. From Sheffield, Bradford or anywhere else in the UK, post the device in fully insured — same free diagnostic, same fixed quote, same no-recovery-no-fee terms as walking through the door.
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 a proper laminar-flow environment, 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.