From Southport and the coast, down through Crosby and Bootle into the city, over the water to Birkenhead, then east to St Helens, Widnes and Warrington. The whole county posts its failed storage to a single bench, and putting a name to the fault is the part nobody is charged for.
The postcode never moves the price. One disk or SSD is £300 + VAT, arrays open at £500 + VAT, and each figure goes in writing when the free diagnostic closes, 2 working days after arrival.
For a small county Merseyside packs a great deal in, and the work changes noticeably depending on which part of it the box was handed over in. These six between them account for most of an ordinary week on the bench.
Photography, film, design and music firms in the Baltic Triangle and the streets behind the docks work off portable drives and striped scratch volumes, because those are fast. Fast is not the same as safe, and a project drive that dies mid-edit takes the whole job with it.
Up by the north docks, along the estuary and over on the Wirral shore, salt in damp air quietly attacks connectors and circuit boards for years while the mechanism carries on regardless. Storage that has lived within sight of the water tends to lose its electronics before anything else goes, and as failures go that is one of the more forgiving ones.
Dental practices, letting agents, joinery workshops and sports clubs all end up running bookings, footage and accounts off a small multi-bay unit shoved into a cupboard with no air moving through it. Heat takes years off a disk, and the day one member gives up, the share simply stops appearing on the network.
A laptop doing the commute every day collects the treatment that goes with it: a bag swung onto a platform at Lime Street, a lid closed while the disk was still turning, a boot lid shut on a case. Dropped 2.5-inch disks are steady, predictable work at this bench.
Wedding and landscape photographers, match-day shooters and drone pilots all fill cards a good deal faster than they get round to emptying them. A card that abruptly reports itself as empty is flash work, £250 + VAT, and it is regularly among the quicker jobs in the queue.
Any number of firms on the estates at Speke, Knowsley, Aintree and Bootle keep the whole of their trading history on one small server or array in a back office. When that drops off the network the member count sets the price, and each disk in it earns an image of its own before a single stripe is put back.
Every town below has a page carrying its own local detail, and the run goes from Southport at the top of the coast to Chester over the Cheshire border. Liverpool has the front page to itself. Anywhere smaller sits with whichever of these is closest, and not a single thing about the service changes with the postcode the box was handed over in.
WA9 to WA11, the town flat glass built. Engineering and fabrication units at Lea Green and out along the East Lancs Road at Haydock keep decades of drawings and CNC programs on one machine, and the terraced streets behind Thatto Heath send in the family external drive.
PR8 and PR9, at the top of the coast. More external drives arrive from here than from almost any comparable town, a great many holding forty years of scanned photographs, alongside hotel booking systems, dental practices and the golf clubs at Birkdale and Hillside.
CH1 to CH4, over the Cheshire line. Solicitors, accountants and surveyors around the Rows and the larger employers out at Chester Business Park, where the usual job is a small office RAID that has been running degraded since some point in the spring.
CH41 and CH42, across the water at the narrow end of the Mersey. Cammell Laird and the engineering workshops around it run on CAD archives, and the offices near Hamilton Square send in the machines that hold them.
WA1 to WA5, where the M6 crosses the M62. Freight moves through the town all day and so does the data tracking it, right up until a disk in a transport office stops and nobody can prove what left the yard on Tuesday.
L20 and L30, behind the Seaforth container terminal. Freight forwarding and customs paperwork is all files now, so a dead disk in a shipping office can leave a load sitting on the quay while somebody hunts for an entry number.
L23, where the iron men stand out in the channel. Photographers are a large share of what this postcode posts in, usually a card or a portable SSD holding a shoot that has not yet been copied off anywhere.
WA8, where the British chemical industry more or less began. Plants keep records because the law requires it, and the machine holding thirty years of them is rarely the newest thing in the building.
WA7, old docks by the canal and new town on the hill behind. Manufacturing and distribution servers off the estates, household drives and laptops from the older streets, and the two send very different parcels.
L39, a market town with a university in it. Dissertations and research data on one laptop with no copy anywhere else, plus farm offices, professional practices and the villages out towards Aughton and Burscough.
Merseyside is compact as counties go, and its roads are busy in a way that bears directly on this: the M62 running east, the M57 and M58 round the top, two tunnels under the river, and the coast road climbing through Crosby to Southport. Nowhere twenty minutes from all of that holds a properly equipped recovery lab, and pretending otherwise would help nobody. So it is the media that travels rather than an engineer. Tracked and insured through the post, or with a courier of your own choosing, and a parcel handed over at any Merseyside counter is generally on the bench the following working day.
The work itself happens at Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, some 35 miles east along the motorway. Nothing is collected from anybody anywhere on this network, and there is no shop to walk into in Liverpool or in any other town on the list. What there is instead is a single building holding the clean bench, the imaging hardware, the donor stock and the engineers who use all three, with a reception desk that takes drop-offs from anyone who happens to be passing. Most people simply post, and posting is what the rest of this page assumes.
Closest and most capable are rarely the same address when storage has physically failed. A clicking disk wants filtered air, a matched donor unit and imaging hardware that reads around bad sectors instead of stalling on them, and none of those three lives in a high street unit. It is exactly why a computer shop offered the job usually forwards it to a laboratory anyway, adding a margin and a week to the process. Typing data recovery specialists near me into a search box is a perfectly sound instinct; the honest answer is that a specialist bench one postal day away beats a counter twenty minutes away that quietly puts your drive in the post.
The second half of that answer is how quickly you find out where you stand. Assessment closes 2 working days after your media arrives and produces a single fixed figure in writing rather than an estimate that wanders upwards. It costs nothing to reach that point, and what happens next is entirely your decision.
The bread-and-butter job is a hard disk: a 3.5-inch out of an office tower in the city, a 2.5-inch out of a student machine at LJMU or the university, or the disk inside an external case that stopped being recognised. Every one of them comes in by the same route and is priced by the same six bands. Flash media, meaning cards and pen drives, sits at £250 + VAT. A single disk of any kind, spinning or solid state and including NVMe blades, is £300 + VAT. Anything with several disks in it starts at £500 + VAT and climbs with the member count, since each one is copied separately before reassembly begins. Recorder disks out of CCTV and DVR units are £400 + VAT, as is a BitLocker unlock. Investigation work with a written report is £800 + VAT, dropping to £400 + VAT for the binary image and deleted-file extraction where no report is needed. VAT is added to every one of those, and the data recovery cost page explains what sits behind each band.
Nor does the coast road stop dead at the county boundary. Parcels arrive on the same overnight run from Blackpool and the Fylde, from Preston, Wigan and Skelmersdale, and from north Wales, and none of that alters a price or a place in the queue. Anything still bolted inside a laptop, a tower, a server or a recorder needs unbolting first, and a repair shop in your own town will handle that for a few pounds. The usual routes in from there are hard drive recovery, SSD recovery, NAS recovery and RAID recovery, along with external drive recovery and LaCie data recovery for the portable drives this county owns in such quantity.
Tracked and insured on the way in, assessed free within 2 working days, and no work until you approve a figure.
Nearly everything on this bench arrived by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a failing drive, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside is normally on the bench the next working day.
Still screwed inside a laptop, tower, MacBook, iMac, server or a CCTV recorder? Take the drive out and post that on its own. We do not strip machines here, and any computer shop will do it in a few minutes. The one job nobody can take on is flash soldered straight to a logic board, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a handful of very slim laptops: if the storage will not unbolt, there is nothing to send.
↓ Print the shipping & booking-in form (PDF)
Address it to Manchester Data Recovery. It is roughly 35 miles from Liverpool along the M62 if you fancy the run, and next working day by tracked post if you do not. We ring or email the moment it is booked in, and the free diagnostic closes 2 working days after that.
Not sure what belongs in the parcel? Call 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or step through the free online diagnostic first.