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What a file recovery service should cost in the UK — and the games some play

// guides · published 2026-08-10 · 7 min read

Why nobody honest prices a drive over the phone

'It's not detected' can describe a £200 job and a £900 job in the same four words. Storage failures share many of the same symptoms, and you're being charged based on the fault, not the symptom. Therefore, if you receive a firm quote from a data recovery company before an engineer has reviewed your hard drive, they are simply guessing, and you'll pay for their guess. Your trust should rest with this order of events: a free diagnosis first, then one fixed quote in writing, and finally your slow nod or quick shake.

What the examination confirms is the level. Logical: the hardware is good, but the organisation of the data is bad. Electronic: a faulty board or bridge. Firmware: the drive's own internal code has stopped working properly. Mechanical: heads or motor failure, and this could involve the use of a head swap bench and replacement donor parts. Prices increase as we progress up through the levels because parts, hours of labour and equipment costs all increase; there are no other honest reasons why the cost would increase.

What the UK market actually charges in 2026

For bearings rather than promises: for the most part, logical work on hardware that is sound will land in the low hundreds of pounds; repairing boards and firmware will fall into the mid hundreds of pounds; recovering mechanically from failures using donor parts and bench time will fall in the upper hundreds and can exceed a grand; and multi-disk RAID, NAS and server recoveries are priced above single drives, scaling with the number of drives and how messy the recovery is. One example of a flat fee from our own pricing sheet for calibration purposes: forensic class CCTV and DVR recorder recovery is £400 + VAT, paid upfront upon acceptance of your fixed quote.

Ranges offer an orientation; they don't price your job, which is what the diagnostic is for. That's why the quote you get afterwards is fixed. The lab absorbs all the risk of surprises, because regardless of how bad the fault looks when opened up, the number you agreed to is the number on the invoice.

Three questions that sort the labs from the funnels

The repeat games deserve a name so you can identify them from afar. Headline prices "from £49" that increase after an "assessment". Assessment fees which stick regardless of whether you receive any results. A basic service throttled down intentionally, to get the premium tier sold. Success so broadly defined that one readable file out of ten thousand triggers the full price.

Three questions will cut through them all. One: is the diagnostic free even if I walk away, with my drive returned? Two: once quoted, can you change the number? Three: what counts as success, and do I get to see verified recovered files before paying? We answer those questions in writing and unblinkingly: yes, free and returned; no, fixed means fixed; success means the files you needed, opened and checked. And the tariff in one line: on logical recoveries you only pay if we recover your data; mechanical, electrical, water or fire damaged drives pay 50% of the quote upfront for the invasive bench stage, with the balance only if we recover your data; forensic-class jobs (ransomware, CCTV, BitLocker) are paid upfront once you accept the fixed quote.

Keeping the bill down without gambling the data

There are 3 ways to avoid higher-than-needed recovery costs. Stop power (and use) immediately when you see symptoms: a drive that stops at the first sign of trouble is the cheapest version of itself it will ever be. Avoid piling on diagnostics and overnight scans on failing hardware: for every night a failing drive spins, the engineer inherits more damage. And once you've got your quote, post the drive rather than paying for a call-out: tracked postage is measured in pounds, call-outs cost multiples of that, and the parcel network reaches this bench within a day from anywhere.

Do the free diagnostic test, or check your device's own page first: recovery of hard disks, recovery of SSDs, recovery of external devices, recovery from RAID, and recovery of NAS systems.

There are three parts to a fair price: a no-cost diagnostic, a fixed price that cannot move, and on logic-based work, you only pay if we recover your data. Any file recovery service offering two parts out of three is a funnel wearing a lab coat.

// questions on this topic

Common questions

Occasionally there is a genuinely different interpretation of the failure, but most often it's just a different business model. Place the quotes side-by-side on three axes: was the diagnostic free or paid-for, was the quoted charge a fixed amount or an "estimation", and what does their agreement count as success. The real differences become obvious very quickly.
You should only consider recovery software when you know that the drive is mechanically healthy and the problem is plain deletion. Even so, the best method would be to create an image of the disk and then recover from the image rather than attempting to recover directly from the original. If the drive makes noise, hangs, intermittently disappears or otherwise appears unhealthy, then with every successive scan you are causing premature degradation of the drive and decreasing your chances of recovering data.
Just the return postage, and that's it. You get to keep the diagnostic cost-free regardless of how you decide to proceed. On a logical fault you only pay if we recover your data.
Often, under contents, business equipment or cyber policies, especially after a physical event such as a surge, flood or drop. Contact your insurance provider. Our diagnostic report and an itemised invoice for your claim are standard paperwork here.

Read enough — want it recovered?

We offer a free diagnostic within two working days of receiving your device, followed by one fixed quote. For logical faults, you only pay if we recover your data. Start online or ring the freephone.

Start a free diagnostic 0800 689 0668