Three separate subjects live on this page and they are worth keeping apart: the few contact fields you type into a form here, custody of the physical media you post to the lab, and the ordinary technical traces a browser leaves behind whenever it loads a web page. Written to be read rather than skipped. In force from August 2026.
Liverpool Data Recovery is the trading name under which recovery work is sold to households, sole traders, practices and businesses in Liverpool, across Merseyside and anywhere else in the country served by a post office. The bench itself is one building: Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN, roughly 35 miles east of the city along the M62. Every question on this page is answered on 0800 689 0668 between Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm, or in writing to support@manchester-datarecovery.co.uk. Anything raised in either channel is answered by a person who works on the jobs, not by a ticketing queue.
Two forms exist here. One sits on the contact page and asks for a callback. The other closes the free diagnostic wizard once you have chosen a device, a manufacturer and a symptom. Both carry the same payload: a name to greet you by, a telephone number to ring, an email address to send the written quote to, and a free-text box in which you set out what happened. The wizard adds the three choices you clicked, so the engineer knows before he rings whether he is looking at a clicking 3.5-inch disk or a locked BitLocker volume.
No date of birth is requested. No address is requested until a parcel actually needs returning. No card number is ever typed into this website, because nothing on it takes payment. Where a job goes ahead, the invoice and the return address are gathered separately at the point they are needed, and they sit in the accounts rather than in a marketing system.
The hidden field labelled to be left empty is a spam trap. Automated form-fillers complete it, humans never see it, and a submission carrying anything in that box is discarded without being read.
Calls to the freephone line are not recorded. What an engineer writes down during one is the same handful of facts a form would have collected, kept against the job so the next person picking up the telephone is not starting again. The live chat window at the corner of the screen is supplied by Olark; a conversation held in it carries whatever you type into it, and it is treated exactly as an email would be.
Under UK GDPR two grounds cover almost everything here. Answering an enquiry, producing a quote, taking custody of media and carrying out a recovery are all steps taken at your request in the run-up to a contract or in performance of one. Keeping invoices and job records for the statutory period afterwards is a legal obligation under tax law. Where an engineer keeps a short technical note about an unusual fault so the next case of its kind runs better, that rests on legitimate interest, and the note describes the hardware rather than the person who owned it.
Nothing on this site is done on the basis of consent to marketing, for the simple reason that no marketing is sent. Filling in a form buys you an answer to the question you asked and nothing else. There is no newsletter, and no list to be quietly added to.
A parcel is opened at reception, the contents are logged against a job number, and the media goes into the lab. From that point it is handled by the engineers doing the work and by nobody else. It is not sub-contracted out, not sent to a third lab, and not carried home in a bag to be looked at over the weekend. Where a drive needs the clean bench, it is opened under filtered air in the same building.
The first technical act on almost every job is a sector-level image. Everything afterwards happens against that image, which is why an original drive can sit still on a shelf while the awkward work goes on. That image is a complete copy of your media, which is precisely why the paragraph below it matters.
Recovery involves reading the file system, rebuilding directory structures and verifying that returned files actually open. All three require the contents to be visible in some form. That is the boundary. Documents are opened to confirm they are intact, not to find out what is in them. Photographs are checked as thumbnails to prove the image data survived. Nothing is copied out of a job for any purpose of ours, nothing is shown to anyone outside the lab, and nothing is discussed beyond the engineers on the job and whoever you nominated as the contact.
Two exceptions exist and both are stated plainly. A court order or a statutory demand from a UK authority is complied with. And material whose possession is itself a criminal offence would be reported, which is the same duty every lab in the country carries.
Investigation work is different in kind, because the whole point of it is examining content and writing up what is found. On those jobs the instructing client, usually a solicitor, an employer or an insurer, decides the scope, and the written report goes to them. Chain-of-custody paperwork records who held the media and when, which is the opposite of an incidental record: it exists to be produced and questioned. Exported CCTV clips are handled the same way. If you are the subject of an investigation rather than the client of one, your rights over that material are exercised through the party who commissioned it.
That list is the whole of it. No advertising network, no data broker, no analytics vendor building an audience out of visitors, and no partner receiving enquiries in exchange for a fee.
Destruction of a working image means a multi-pass wipe of the storage holding it, or physical destruction of the platters where a disk is being retired. It does not mean dragging a folder to a bin.
Physically, the lab is a controlled building with the recovery area behind a further door and media held in it rather than on desks. Nothing leaves for a third party. Electronically, working storage is encrypted, recovered data goes back to you on encrypted media with the passphrase supplied separately, and access to job storage is limited to the engineers on the bench. The website carries no database of customers because it never builds one; forms hand off to mail and keep nothing.
Nobody can promise that a transmission over the internet is impossible to intercept, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What can be said is that an email form is used for contact details and never for the data being recovered, and that recovered data itself travels physically on encrypted media rather than over a wire.
The recovery work, the media and the job records stay in the United Kingdom. The exceptions are the two third-party scripts named above. Olark and Google Fonts are operated from outside the UK, so loading a page here means a request reaching servers abroad, covered by the transfer safeguards those providers publish. If that matters to you, both are avoidable: ring the freephone line instead of using the chat window, and a browser set to block third-party font requests will render this site in a system typeface with nothing else lost.
Server logs record an IP address, a timestamp, the page requested and the browser string, which is what a web server has always written down and what it needs in order to serve a page and fend off abuse. Those logs are rotated and discarded on a short cycle. Google Fonts sees the same class of request data in the course of delivering typefaces.
This site sets no advertising cookies, no tracking pixels and no cross-site identifiers. There is no analytics suite building a profile of where you went next. The only cookie you might meet belongs to the Olark chat window, which uses one to remember a conversation already in progress so you are not made to repeat yourself. Decline it and the site works exactly as before.
UK GDPR gives you a set of rights over personal information held about you, and every one of them is honoured here without argument:
Ring 0800 689 0668 or write to support@manchester-datarecovery.co.uk and say what you want done. Proof of identity may be asked for, purely so information is not handed to the wrong person.
Raise it with us first, on the freephone line or by email, and it will be looked at properly. Should the answer still not satisfy you, the Information Commissioner's Office regulates this and takes complaints at ico.org.uk or on their own helpline. Going to them does not cost you anything and does not affect the handling of your job.
This is a service bought by adults. Nothing here is aimed at children and no age-related information is collected. Where a recovered device belonged to a child, the parent or guardian who commissioned the job is the person we deal with.
The date at the top marks the current version. Anything that materially alters how information is handled will be written here, and where a change affects an open job the customer is told directly rather than expected to notice a web page had been edited.
Freephone 0800 689 0668, Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm. Email support@manchester-datarecovery.co.uk. Post to Manchester Data Recovery, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5AN. The terms and conditions (PDF) cover the commercial side, and the contact page explains how to get a device here in one piece.