When checking who to use for data recovery in the UK indeed worldwide be sure of a few things.
If a sale price is half the previous price .. when does a sale end ? and do they have the facilities needed to do what they say they can do or are they sent away and if so who do they send it to.. its your data you need to know where it is.
Just because a London or Belfast or wherever based data recovery company quotes you £1000+ for your hard drive to be rebuilt do not assume the work is done in London. You would be surprised many go to Latvia, NewYork and now most go to one of the largest labs in the UK which charges a third of the cost direct to the general public and are based in Sheffield.
Any successful Data Recovery will have a lot of equipment, software, and at least one clean room.
They will have data recovery, hard drive fault diagnosis, hard drive rebuild and electronics experts who do this sort of work day day out and have the systems to make the chance of recovery the highest possible.
They will be more than a name and a website that looks good and claiming they have been around for years but there is no record of them before last month ask for their company number and ask when they were incorporated.
The most well known data recovery companies are not necessarily the most expensive except for the global players who generally charge higher rates on the back of their marketing expenses.
The UK data recovery industry is a fragile one with many data recovery companies not having accounts, losing clients data and even going bust after sending drives abroad for repair.
Some do not even send them away and attempt rebuilds or repairs they no nothing about and have at best a 1 in 10 chance of being lucky the other 9 saya good bye to your lifes work , works data or precious memories.
Find a company with its own ISO Certified clean room, there should be a certificate on their website.
Ask for its company number for your reference, make sure it is not a name just set up to trade for a couple of years then do a bunk before the tax man catches up.
Beware of testimonials which are too good to be true, and from companies which are unlikely to deal with new data recovery companies. How do you check if a data recovery company has done work for the government anyway ?
Most claim to have done work for big international, fact is they might have done work for an employee but it is highly unlikely any company want to admit to losing valuable data, why because heads of departments cannot afford the bad publicity.
Sometimes the best data recovery companies are those with just a few specific testimonials from real world people who have given their permission for their name to be used, do not hold any store about testimonials that seem to be penned by the same website design company.
So when choosing a data recovery company beware, use your judgement and ask if they are members of any trade bodies where you can check their credentials or if they have had their lab tested by an independant clean room testing company like Bassaire or Monmouth Scientific and do not worry where your drive is going to, just worry if you are likely to get it back !.