Data Recovery Auckland

Every job starts with a diagnostic assessment from $230. Recovery itself is quoted after diagnosis, because the cost depends on the fault - recovering deleted files from a healthy drive is a very different job from rebuilding a dropped drive with donor parts. You'll always have a firm quote in front of you before any recovery work starts. Full details are on the pricing page.

Because the diagnosis is real work - engineer time on real equipment - and someone always pays for it. Businesses offering it free recover the cost somewhere, usually inside the recovery prices of the customers who proceed, which is one reason quotes in this industry can balloon after you've committed. Charging for the assessment lets us do it properly, give you an honest answer either way, and quote a firm price with no padding.

Assessment timeframes depend on the device and what's in the queue, so we'll give you a realistic one when you book. Recovery time after approval depends on the fault: some jobs finish within days, while mechanical failures needing donor parts can take longer. We'll give you a realistic timeframe with your quote.

Not necessarily. Clicking usually means a mechanical failure, and mechanical failures are often recoverable. What matters most is what happens next: every power-on can drag failed heads across the platters that hold your data. Switch it off, leave it off, and get it assessed. No honest lab will promise a result before diagnosis - but drives that arrive powered off and untouched give us the best possible starting point.

Sometimes that's reasonable. If you deleted files on a drive that's otherwise healthy, good software can work - run it from a different drive and recover to a different drive, never onto the one you're recovering from. But if the drive is clicking, isn't detected, was dropped, or keeps disconnecting, software can't fix what's physically wrong - and every scan pushes a failing drive closer to the end. If you're not sure which situation you're in, ring us before you try anything.

Often, yes - especially if the verdict came from a retail counter rather than a lab, or if nobody actually opened the drive. Plenty of drives written off elsewhere are recoverable with the right equipment. We'll also tell you plainly when something truly is gone: severely scored platters, data overwritten with new data, and some failed or encrypted SSDs are beyond any lab, anywhere. Either way, you'll get a straight answer.

You'll get a straight explanation of what failed and why recovery isn't possible, and your device back. The assessment fee covers the diagnostic work that produced that answer. Nobody can promise a recovery before diagnosis - we'd rather give you the truth than a sales pitch.

Yes. Your device stays in our Auckland lab, the work is done in-house by our own team, and your files are treated as confidential - accessed only as far as verifying the recovery requires. Recovered data is held on encrypted storage until you've confirmed you have it, then securely erased.

Our job is the data. Getting it back often involves repair-like work - board repairs, donor parts - but a drive that has failed once shouldn't be trusted with your files again. Recovered data is returned on new media, and we'll tell you honestly whether the original device has a future.

Yes - failed Synology and QNAP arrays, dead rebuilds and multi-drive failures are regular lab work. If an array has failed: power it down, don't force a rebuild, don't initialise anything, and if you remove drives, label their bay order. Then talk to us. More on the RAID, NAS & server recovery page.

The lab is at 213 Dominion Road, Mount Eden, Auckland 1024. If you're anywhere else in New Zealand, the overnight courier process is simple - here's how it works.