Data recovery is an area where most places have you over a barrel.

It's very rare that anyone wants to recover an operating system or program files from a damaged computer. These things are easily reinstalled. It's more often personal or essential files. Photos, documents, music, video files. Items which are irreplaceable.

Certain High Street presences offer data recovery "from" £79.99 - however you will often pay between £150 - £200. This is dressed up with an excessive labour charge.

My charge for data recovery is just £50. While it's true it can take sometimes up to and over fourteen hours to recover a large hard drive, it doesn't require any physical work on my part. It's mainly software lead. I will not charge you labour for this time.

In many cases data recovery can be performed on-site, especially for camera cards, USB memory sticks and smaller hard drives or accidental erasures (yes, even if you removed it from the recycle bin I can still get it back). In this instance the charge is just for the usual 1hr callout so is £40.

The £50 Data Recovery will involve me taking the hard drive away and processing it within 2 working days. I will return the hard drive to you in person with your recovered files on DVD-R media.

Do not be taken advantage of by excessively high data recovery costs. However please note that if your files take up more than 3 DVD-R discs (approx 12gb) you will be charged at 50p per additional disc.