The British chemical industry more or less began in Widnes, and the town has lived with the jobs and the consequences ever since. Plants keep records because the law requires it, and when the machine holding those records dies a WA8 firm is not looking for sympathy, only for the files.
Widnes jobs are diagnosed free. One fixed figure in writing before any work starts, and £300 + VAT covers a single drive or SSD.
Industrial data is the bulk of what WA8 sends. Works and contractors along Ditton and Moss Bank, laboratories and testing houses, plant maintenance systems, calibration logs, batch and quality records that may have to be produced for an audit three or four years after anyone last opened them. Industrial PCs are the usual casualty: a machine that has run continuously in a cabinet since 2018, taking heat and vibration, with a consumer-grade disc in it and a backup nobody has verified. When it stops, the compliance question arrives before the IT question does.
The rest of the town produces a different post. Fabricators and small engineering firms with drawings and cutting files, hauliers and distribution units around the approaches to the Mersey Gateway with camera recorders and stock systems, and households in Farnworth, Halton View, Appleton and Upton Rocks holding photographs on one external drive. The Catalyst museum keeps the town's chemical history safe on the hill above the Silver Jubilee Bridge; most people are considerably less organised about their own.
Both bridges point south and neither is any use for this. The bench is east, in Manchester, and everything arrives by tracked, insured post: Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, next working day from Widnes. Only the bare drive travels, so it has to be removed from the machine or the recorder first. A courier you book yourself is fine and is your cost. Nothing is collected, and there is no counter in Widnes. Reception at the Manchester lab will take a drive in person if you would rather drive it over.
The diagnostic costs nothing and is finished within 2 working days of the parcel arriving, at which point you get one fixed written figure and an honest view of what will come back. Single hard drive or SSD, NVMe included, £300 + VAT. Memory cards and USB pen drives £250 + VAT. Arrays, NAS and servers from £500 + VAT, rising with the disc count. CCTV and DVR £400 + VAT. BitLocker £400 + VAT. Forensic investigation with a written report £800 + VAT. Logical faults run under no fix, no fee. Mechanical, electronic, board-level and chip-level work, and water or fire damage, take 50% of the quoted price up front with the balance due only on success. Hale, Halebank, Cronton and Ditton use the same terms, on 0800 689 0668, Mon-Fri 9:00am-5:30pm.
Almost every job on this bench came in by tracked, insured post. It is the calmest way to move a drive that is already struggling, and a parcel handed in anywhere on Merseyside usually reaches the bench the following 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.
The diagnosis costs nothing, the figure is written down, and a single drive or SSD is £300 + VAT.