Looking costs nothing · one fixed figure after
Price your NAS recovery. Tell us the unit and what it is saying; we will tell you what it takes.
This page is for network drives of every kind: one bay or twenty-four, Synology or home-built, crashed, degraded, wiped, ransomed or dead. Two questions give you a likely cause, the price band and the one thing not worth trying tonight. The short form below opens your case; the fuller booking sheet further down goes in the box with the drives. Either way we reply by email with the posting address, the nearest drop-off point and a sheet to print. After the free look you get one figure in writing. A single-drive NAS is £300 + VAT, a two-bay unit or any set is £500 + VAT upwards, four bays, rack units and larger arrays start at £1,250 + VAT, and on most jobs no data means no bill.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0800 6890668
Two questions, and a likely cause.
The order of the job →What kind of unit?
Whichever comes closest will do.
Two taps and you get a plain answer, plus the one action worth taking before any other. A diagnosis it is not; for that the drives have to be on an engineer's bench. Read it as the answer the telephone would give at three in the morning, when the telephone is not there to give it.
Now the detail.
What happens after you send it.
Every band, in prose →An answer inside a working day
A person reads what you write; nothing is sorted by script. Back comes a straight first view of what is likely, one instruction about what not to touch meanwhile, the posting address, the nearest drop-off point and a booking sheet to print. We do not publish the address; it comes by email in reply to the form, and the booking sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Your case number is issued that day and emailed to you.
The bench names the fault Free
A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive, and the unit and the drives are assessed apart on our own equipment, never in a NAS that will try to rebuild. That is where the fault is actually named: which drives, which layer, which layout. Allow about 48 hours for a small set; larger ones take longer, and you are told which at booking-in.
The figure, and your decision
The figure arrives in writing, the findings alongside it. Accept it and work begins. Decline and the drives travel home with the postage at our end. Nothing is owed for the free look in either case, and nothing further down the page quietly undoes that.
The booking sheet: on screen, printed, or both.
Getting it packed.
Run through this before taping it
- Put every key on the sheet, or send it by email once the case is open: the volume recovery key, the folder password, the exported .key file, the dataset passphrase. Encryption has no side door for a laboratory either.
- List the drives by bay, with make, model and size. It is the single most useful thing on the sheet.
- Name whatever you cannot do without: the shares, the LUNs, the VMs. Copying begins there.
- Be honest about what has been tried. A rebuild that ran, a reinstall, a forced import, a factory reset: each changes the plan, and knowing helps.
Worth saying twice: whatever the checker said, leave the unit off and the drives in their bays. A great deal of the work on this bench was made harder by one more rebuild to see whether today might be different.
The questions that come up first.
Is the checker actually a diagnosis?
It is not. What the checker does is infer from the boxes you ticked. A diagnosis means your drives on an engineer's bench, the fault named and the layout read from the metadata — and only that sets a price. Take the checker's word on what to leave alone tonight; take the bench's word on cost.
How much will it be?
A single-drive NAS is £300 + VAT. A two-bay unit or any RAID, SHR or mirrored set is £500 + VAT upwards, and four bays, rack units and larger arrays start at £1,250 + VAT. The pricing page sets it all out in prose, and the free look is what produces your one written figure.
Is no data, no bill genuinely true?
On most jobs, yes: nothing recovered means nothing to pay. Two kinds of work fall outside it — a set another laboratory has already worked on, and drives that have been opened at home. If yours is one of those you are told at the outset, well before you agree to spend a penny.
Do I send the whole NAS or just the drives?
The drives, always, labelled by bay, and the unit too where it holds a key, a layout or a cache. When in doubt, send both, with the power supply.
How soon does an answer come?
Within one working day at the outside, and usually much faster while the desk is staffed. The free look is slower: reckon on about 48 hours for a small set once it is on a bench, longer for large ones.
A price inside two minutes.
Checker, form, parcel, bench — and the decision is yours, made with one figure in front of you and nothing to pay for the looking.