Stonehaven is twenty minutes along the coast from town, and a long way from anywhere with the equipment necessary to properly open up a hard disk. First get a quote, then either post your drive in or drop it off at our Edinburgh lab (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed). Our bench is just a tracked label away, and there are no charges for the diagnosis.
You get a free diagnosis on Stonehaven jobs. A single, fixed price is given in writing prior to doing any work, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
There are really two halves of AB39. On the commuter side, there are those who travel to work in Aberdeen or Westhill, whose laptops, home NAS boxes and backup drives carry work files they cannot afford to lose. In addition, an increasing number of people are now doing that work from a spare room above the harbour. The second part is the town's own trade: hotels, restaurants, seafront businesses and holiday lets running tills, booking systems and camera recorders which pick their moment to stop working. And lastly there is the coast itself, from Muchalls down to Catterline, supplying photographers, small farms and households whose complete photographic history sits on just one unbacked external drive.
Salt, damp and a garage in February are much harsher on storage than you would think. The contacts will corrode, the boards themselves will give out, and if your hard drive has been left in a bag for too long it may develop some sort of mechanical failure, announcing its demise with either a click or a beep. This does not mean that the data stored on the drive is lost; it simply means that the drive cannot present that data any more, which is a different problem from losing it, and usually a solvable one. What genuinely destroys files is persistence: leaving a clicking drive plugged in, running scan-and-fix across a corrupted volume, or letting a machine initialise a disk it no longer understands.
First, get a quote, either by telephone or with our free online diagnostic. Next, post the bare drive, fully tracked and insured, from Stonehaven (a single external drive comes whole, in its enclosure, with its own cable and power supply). It will arrive the next working day. Alternatively, you can use your own courier; that arrangement is entirely yours. Are you already driving down the A90? If so, 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, with no appointment needed. Nothing is picked up from Stonehaven or anywhere else; that service does not exist here at all, and it is fairer to say so than to let anyone wait for it.
Diagnosis is free. It is completed within 2 working days of the device arriving, and the result is one written figure that holds. On logical faults, in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. To open a drive, or rebuild a circuit board because of a drop, a power surge, a soaking or a fire, requires 50% of the quote first, and the remaining balance is owed only if we recover your data. Ransomware, BitLocker and recorder work is forensic-classed and requires payment in full before work begins. We do not pay ransoms, nor do we arrange for anyone else to make such payments. No phones, no tablets and no soldered-down storage: only removable drives and SSDs. If you're not sure which kind you have, please ring us before posting anything. Portlethen, Newtonhill, Muchalls, Catterline, Inverbervie, Laurencekirk and the Mearns all send their work in on exactly the same footing. Freephone 0800 689 0668.
Get a quote first by telephone or use our free online diagnostic. Most of what you see on this bench will then be delivered via tracked, insured post. This is one of the safest ways to move a failing drive and packages handed in at a North-East post office are normally delivered here the next working day.
Still attached to a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV/DVR unit? Remove the hard drive or SSD first. The bare drive travels on its own; when removing disks from a server remove all the disks and label each disk by its bay. This lab does not take machines apart. Any storage that has been soldered onto a motherboard (as in T2 and Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of thin laptops) will not be worked on: if it will not unbolt, we cannot work on it. If you're not sure what type of machine you have, ring us first. Phones and tablets are also not taken on.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Your parcel should be addressed to Edinburgh Data Recovery, approximately two and a half hours (and 130 miles) from Aberdeen via the A90; alternatively it can reach us the next working day by tracked post if this journey time / distance is prohibitive to travel. As soon as your drive has been scheduled in we will contact you.
Still unsure about what should be placed inside of the packaging? Please call us first on 0800 689 0668, or use our free online diagnostic tool to assist you in deciding which items belong inside of the packaging before sealing.
Free diagnostics, the quoted figure in writing, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. This service is available online or over the phone.