One of the biggest questions we receive is ‘how much does data recovery cost?’. The short answer is, it really depends on a number of factors, such as the type of device, the nature and severity of the damage, and the amount of work involved in completing the data recovery and saving your precious data.

Think of hard drive data recovery like a car repair. If your car is having problems and you send it to the garage, the cost to repair could range from cheap to highly expensive; it all depends what’s wrong with it. The mechanic won’t be able to give you a price there and then, but may be able to give you a vague estimate. For this reason, to avoid any unnecessary charges or unpleasant surprises, we don’t charge a penny to diagnose what’s wrong with your hard disk drive, solid state drive, USB flash drive, SD card, mobile phone, or whatever device you need data recovered from - we'll simply give you a quote to go ahead with the data recovery work. 

When you send your device in, you have our guarantee that you won’t pay a penny until we've undertaken the free data recovery diagnosis and you receive your no-obligation quote and file listing of recoverable files. At this point, you can either accept the quote or decline it. If you accept, we will press on with the data recovery work as soon as we receive payment, and get your files back to you via your chosen method. We offer a free USB flash drive with 59GB of storage for smaller amounts of data, or you can purchase or borrow an external hard drive for a small fee. Alternatively, many of our customers sent their own external hard drive or USB flash drive in. If you decline the data recovery quote, we’ll send your media back to you via secure courier.

So how much does data recovery cost? As previously mentioned, giving an exact quote when our technicians don’t know the full extent of the work is very difficult. However, a good benchmark is around £195 and upwards, depending on the severity of the damage. While this might come as a surprise to many people, it is the industry standard and unfortunately this is how much data recovery services cost. Normally, logical or software issues tend to be at the lower end, with media that has been physically damaged at the higher end. There really isn’t an upper limit, but as an example, we had a laptop hard drive into the lab earlier this year that had been in a fire. The price we quotes for this job was £695, and the data recovery was successful; we were able to get all of the customer’s data back.

Occasionally, we aren’t able to provide a file listing after the initial data recovery assessment. In these instances, we may need to undertake further work for a small, non-refundable cost. Again, this is completely no-obligation and you won’t pay a penny until you agree. However, the vast majority of our customers receive their free diagnosis and file listing, normally within 24-48 hours, along with their no-obligation data recovery quote.

The high costs involved in data recovery are why we always encourage customers to back up their precious files and folders at regular intervals to avoid the need for a professional data recovery service. In addition to this, there are ways that users can undertake free data recovery at home, so long as the damage isn’t hardware-related.