A developer resigns from a software firm near Heslington; a quarter later a rival demonstrates a feature that took your team two years. For York's engineering, software and design businesses we turn that recognition into an itemised, dated account of what left, by which route — and how the rival's material compares with your originals.
◇ Method before speed. The free assessment and a written scope come first; forensic fees are settled in full before any examination starts. No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Product, engineering and studio businesses tend to notice these first. Preservation should come before investigation — and well before confrontation.
Trade secrets rarely leave through a breach. They leave with a valid login, during working hours, inside the ordinary noise of a business week — and the loss shows itself months on, as a tender beaten by an uncomfortable margin or a product with familiar geometry. What it leaves behind are three answerable questions: what moved, along which channel, on which days. Your own estate already holds the answers, waiting to be read.
Working from verified images of the relevant workstations and file server, we reassemble the exit end to end: device records that show design sets and repositories leaving together, browser and sync-client traces of uploads into private storage, the print trail around protected folders, and deleted material brought back where a clean-up was attempted. The image is then swept for your part numbers, project names and confidentiality markings, so renamed copies do not slip past on a technicality.
When your material is already in other hands, lineage becomes the contest. Office files, PDFs and CAD drawings carry internal records — author and company fields, revision history, reference numbers, save timestamps — that survive renaming and casual edits. Set against your originals, they can show a rival document descending from yours. The rival material has to arrive by a lawful route — disclosure, or an order of the court — and on that footing the comparison converts resemblance into something a judge can weigh.
IP claims are shaped in their first fortnight. Prompt imaging fixes the record ahead of any tidying — the difference between a springboard or search-order application built on evidence and one built on inference. Machines come out of service and into images immediately; reporting is prepared to evidential standards, findings ahead of the technical appendix; and if the court orders imaging of a respondent's hardware, we carry the order out precisely as drawn. Covert collection forms no part of the service.
The wider method sits at the forensic recovery hub. Removable-media evidence has its own page at USB device forensics, credential misuse at insider threat forensics, and fees on our prices page.
Together they move a familiar-looking rival product from grievance to record.
Design libraries, repositories and databases leaving together.
Part numbers, project names and confidentiality banners located on the image.
Internal document records tracing a rival file back to your original.
Webmail, transfer sites and personal cloud uploads, dated.
Erased files and archives restored into the record.
Opens, exports and print activity on the protected files.
The free diagnostic that opens every case is completed within 2 working days of arrival; forensic casework itself is not a no fix, no fee service. The full forensic investigation with report is £800 + VAT, payable 100% upfront. The less expensive Forensic binary image and deleted-file extraction service, without the report, is £400 + VAT. Any Forensic work required will be payable upfront. Both figures are itemised on our prices page, and the written scope is agreed before payment is taken.
IP matters proceed on your company's own estate, or on hardware the court has ordered imaged, strictly to the order's terms. Instructions are accepted on three footings only: equipment the company itself owns; the instruction of a solicitor, insurer or court; or devices that are genuinely the client's own — including jointly owned machines in matrimonial matters. We do not hack, we do not intercept live communications, and we do not examine a device the instructing client has no right to examine.
The opening hours of an IP case set the ceiling on proof. Call 0800 689 0668 today, leave the machines untouched, and we will settle which hardware travels and how — securely to our Leeds location, custody recorded from signature.
Is the drive still inside a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Take the hard drive or SSD out first and post the bare drive on its own — removing drives from machines isn't a service we offer. Storage that's soldered to a motherboard (Apple Silicon Macs, certain slim laptops) is the one thing we can't work on: if it doesn't come out, it can't come in.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Address the parcel for the attention of Leeds Data Recovery — about 40 minutes from York via the A64 and A1(M), or next working day by tracked post. You'll hear from us the moment it's booked onto the bench.
Not certain what to pack? Ring 0800 689 0668 first, or run the free online diagnostic.
Withdraw the machines, ring the freephone — early images give an injunction its footing.