Stonehaven is twenty minutes down the coast from town and a long way from anywhere that can open a hard drive properly. Post it. The bench is a tracked label away and the diagnosis costs nothing.
Stonehaven jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed figure in writing before any work, and no fix no fee on the bulk of recoveries.
AB39 splits neatly in two. There is the commuter half: people working in Aberdeen or Westhill whose laptops, home NAS boxes and backup drives carry work they cannot afford to lose, plus the growing number now doing that work from a spare room above the harbour. There is the town's own trade: hotels, restaurants, seafront businesses and holiday lets running tills, booking systems and camera recorders that pick their moment to fail. And there is the coast itself, from Muchalls down through Catterline to Inverbervie, supplying photographers, small farms and households whose entire photographic history sits on one unbacked external.
Salt, damp and a garage in February are harder on storage than people expect. Contacts corrode, boards give out, and a drive that has lived in a bag develops a mechanical fault announcing itself as a click or a beep. None of that means the data has gone. It means the drive can no longer present the data, which is a different problem 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.
Post the bare drive tracked and insured from Stonehaven and it arrives the following working day. Your own courier is fine and stays entirely your arrangement. Driving down the A90 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. 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, complete within 2 working days of arrival, and out of it comes a single written figure that holds. Logical faults are no fix, no fee. Opening a drive in clean air, or rebuilding a board after a drop, a surge, a soaking or a fire, needs 50% of the quote first with the rest owed only if it works. Ransomware, BitLocker and recorder work is forensic-classed and paid up front in full; we will neither pay nor arrange a ransom. No phones, no tablets, and no soldered-down storage — removable drives and SSDs only. Portlethen, Newtonhill, Muchalls, Catterline, Inverbervie, Laurencekirk and the Mearns all send work in on exactly the same footing. 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.