No proper drive lab sits within reach of the Highlands, so Inverness has long since learned to post things. Send it tracked. It reaches an engineer the next day, gets read on equipment that talks to the drive underneath the USB port, and you are told exactly what it is.
Inverness jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed figure in writing before any work, and no fix no fee on the bulk of recoveries.
Inverness is the only city between Aberdeen and the west coast, and the work coming off it reflects that. Council and health service laptops across IV1 to IV3. Server and NAS volumes from the professional firms on the Longman and around Inverness Campus. Booking systems, tills and camera recorders belonging to hotels, distillery visitor centres and tour operators who take a year's money in five months and cannot lose the ledger in August. Research and dissertation drives from University of the Highlands and Islands students. Croft and estate accounts out of the glens. Plus the steady trickle of family externals bought once, filled, and copied nowhere.
The route in is simple enough. Pull the bare drive or SSD if it comes out cleanly, wrap it so it cannot rattle, and send it tracked and insured from any post office counter in the city; that is a next-day arrival from Inverness. A courier account of your own does exactly the same job and remains your arrangement and your bill. If a run south is happening anyway, devices are taken by hand at Edinburgh Data Recovery, 4 Redheughs Rigg, Westpoint, South Gyle, Edinburgh EH12 9DQ, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. No van comes north. Nothing is fetched from customers on this site, so plan around the post office rather than around a pickup that is not coming.
People searching for disaster recovery in Inverness usually mean one of two things and they are worth separating. The first is planning: backups that get tested, a copy held somewhere other than the same building, and a written idea of what happens on the morning the server refuses to start. That is your IT provider's trade, not ours. The second is the bench — the array, the drive or the SSD has already gone, and the data has to be lifted off the hardware itself. That is our trade and it is the whole of what we do. If you are in the second situation, power everything down and stop rebuilding, because a rebuild across a degraded array is the most dependable method yet invented for turning a full recovery into a partial one.
Pricing is settled before anything begins. Assessment costs nothing, closes out inside 2 working days of the parcel reaching the bench, and produces a single written figure that holds. Logical work carries no fix, no fee: corrupt file systems, deleted or reformatted volumes, an SSD that has dropped out of the machine. Mechanical, electrical, water and fire jobs take 50% before the bench work, because donor parts and clean-air hours are real money, and the remainder is owed only on a result. Ransomware, BitLocker and recorder work sits in the forensic band and is paid up front. We will not arrange a ransom payment and we do not recommend one. Neither phones nor tablets are accepted, and storage soldered to a motherboard cannot be taken at all. Dingwall, Nairn, Beauly, Fort William, Ullapool, Thurso, Skye and the rest of the Highlands post in like everywhere else in Scotland. Freephone 0800 689 0668.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, the figure written down, no fix no fee on most jobs. Online or on the phone.