Every band, in prose
What NAS data recovery costs. In sentences, because a table would imply more certainty than a sealed set allows.
The first look is free. After it, you get one figure in writing, and nothing chargeable begins until you agree. A single-drive NAS, a My Cloud, a one-bay Synology or QNAP, a LinkStation, a Time Capsule, is £300 + VAT. A two-bay NAS or any RAID, SHR, X-RAID, TRAID, BeyondRAID or ZFS set is £500 + VAT upwards, rising with the number of drives and with what was done to the set before it arrived. Four bays and above, rack units and larger arrays start at £1,250 + VAT. On most jobs, if no data comes back, there is no bill. Recovered files go home on fresh media, and return postage is paid here. A single drive normally takes 3–4 days at the bench after the free look; a set 5–10 days at the bench.
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The opening figure, by job.
One drive is one price. A single-bay unit of any make, dead, red-lit, crashed or reset, is £300 + VAT after a free look, with the figure in writing before any chargeable work, whether the fault turns out to be a failed update on the system partition or a head swap in clean air. The My Cloud Home's coded filenames, the My Book Live's 64K blocks and the Time Capsule's sparsebundles sit inside that figure too.
Two or more drives that made up one volume are a set, and a set starts at £500 + VAT. That covers a two-bay Synology or QNAP, a My Cloud Mirror or EX2, a LinkStation Duo, a ReadyNAS 212, a two-drive Drobo, and any home-built mirror. Sets of three or four drives sit in the same band, from £500 + VAT and rising with the number of members and with what has been done to the set before it arrives: a set that was powered down when the rebuild stopped is less work than one that was rebuilt again, reinstalled and moved to another unit.
Four bays and above, rack units, and larger arrays — a DS1821+, a TS-873AU, a ReadyNAS 626X, a Drobo 8D, a TrueNAS box with eight disks, a Pegasus — start at £1,250 + VAT, with several pools, an SSD cache and iSCSI LUNs inside the figure. Priority handling, where the set goes to the front of the bench, is quoted separately and only when you ask for it. VAT is added to every figure at the standard rate.
What moves a figure within its band.
The number of drives, first: a set is priced for its members, because every one of them is imaged and every image is part of the reconstruction. Then what was done before the parcel: a rebuild that ran into a second failure, a reinstall over the system partition, a forced ZFS import, a factory reset, drives swapped between bays, a Drobo relayout that ran. Each is honestly described as more work, and each is quoted before you agree.
What does not move the figure: the RAID level, the maker's name for it, the file system, or a drive inside the set that needs a head swap. SHR-2 and RAID 6 cost the same as RAID 5; Btrfs the same as ext4; a set with one clicking member the same as a set with none. Encryption adds a step on the image once the key is supplied, and not usually a cost. A set another laboratory has already worked on, or drives that have been opened at home, sit outside the no data, no bill promise, and you are told that at the outset.
What the free look covers.
Logging, a number on every drive, photographs, and a read-only assessment on our own equipment: the unit tested on its own, each drive read on the bench, the metadata on each read for the layout it describes and the event counts that say what dropped out when. We identify the drives, the layers, the fault, and how much can honestly be read back. You then get an account of what we found, what we expect to recover, and one price. If you say no, the drives come back to you at our expense, and nothing is owed.
What the maker's repair, and the £49 download, are really offering.
The makers' own repair buttons work when every surviving drive is healthy and you have a backup: Synology's Repair on a degraded pool, QNAP's rebuild, ReadyNAS's resync. Every one reads every sector of every survivor, and on drives that have aged together that is where the second failure is found. The bench runs the same arithmetic on images, which cannot drop out, and that is the whole of the difference. None of the makers runs a recovery laboratory; Synology's note on a crashed pool is that it cannot be repaired by the user, Netgear has left the business, and Drobo's parent was liquidated in 2023.
Recovery software has a narrower place than its advertising suggests: a healthy set, every drive readable, the RAID metadata intact, and the software run from another machine against the drives in a dock. Used that way, on deleted files or a lost partition, it works. It cannot image a weak drive, it cannot reconstruct a layer whose metadata is damaged, and against a set with a failing member every scan is thousands of extra reads of the weakest surface. The free look is where you find out which yours is, and it costs nothing.
The questions that come up first.
Is the first look really free?
Yes. Diagnosis carries no charge on any job, and if you decline the figure the drives come back to you with nothing owed and the postage paid here.
What if nothing can be recovered?
On most jobs, no data means no bill. The two exceptions — a set another laboratory has worked on, and drives opened at home — are named before you agree to anything.
Does the RAID level or the make change the price?
No. The number of drives does: £300 + VAT for one, £500 + VAT upwards for any set, from £1,250 + VAT for four bays and above and rack units.
Is there a deposit?
No. Nothing is charged until you have seen the file list and accepted the figure.
How do I pay?
By bank transfer or card, once you have approved the file list. The recovered data and the original drives go back together, with the postage paid here.
That is the entire list.
Yours arrives in writing after a free look, and the decision is yours with one figure in front of you.