I've been doing some data recovery work for the people at Recover Deleted Data. It's been fun and the work has been varied - there have been plenty and hard drives and phone in need of attention for me the recover the files from. Here are some examples:

i have Hitachi external hard disk which is badly damaged. i have shown it to external recovery lab "stellar" and they diagnose and told us that the data recovery is not possible due to the heavy scratches on the surface of platter. i have some important data files which i need to recover. if 100% is not possible at least some important folder will nee to recover. can you please help me on this,.

I have a Seagate Freeagent desktop that powers on (light on) but then clicks and isn't recognised by my windows laptop. I'd like to recover the data (photos and films)

We urgently need a 4tb Seagate Hard drive recovered at our company. The drive is not appearing on any desktop machines under the 'device' section within finder. I am wondering what your typical timeline would be for a repair like this?

My Samsung M3 1TB Portable hard drive makes a funny noise when I plug it into my laptop and the laptop no longer recognises it. It fell on the wooden floor from the computer tower, so roughly 60 cm. Now it does a faint high pitched noise and blinks when plugged in the computer but the computer does not recognize it.

I have erased all my files on a small olympus vn-7800 voice recorder. The recorder doesn't have a USB output. Is there any way you would be able to recover these lost files?

WD Scorpio Blue 500GB (Circuit board 2060-701572-002 Rev A) not starting and getting very hot, heat/burn marks on some of the contacts on the circuit board. Are you able to provide a replacement board?

my external hard drive just went dead,but it is switched on it does not respond to the pc (name of the hard drive is seagate backup plus portable drive ). So not a bad couple of weeks work at Recover Deleted Data. I'm back there in 2018

Water and phones have never been the best of friends. Dropping a phone into water usually has disastrous effects and if your phone isn't insured you're going to have to buy another one, but what about getting the data back ? How are you going to do that?

iphone 6s is dead cannot retrieve photos or contact list stored on device not sim card cannot switch on ever since my phone was left in water overnight in Luton, Bedfordshire.

My mobile device – Xiaomi Redmi 3S had a contact with water and didn't survive it. I have tried several times to dry it but no results. it's dead. I would like to recover all the data that was on the phone (pics,videos and files). Please let me know if you support this device and what could be the cost of it.

Forgot passcode had to factory settings phone (it's an iPhone 6) Now photos SMS what's app needed for very important case urgent. I'm in Milton Keynes and can travel to Luton.

Dropped iphone 6s and it won't switch on. Tried charging with different chargers. At one point the apple logo came up but still didn't turn on fully. Now it seems like it's dead but I would like to recover my data.

I am enquiring about my iPhone 6 which is water damaged. I thought I got away with it as the phone still worked, but un be known to me I caused more damage by carrying on using it. The damage occurred around 6months ago and the phone has been sat in a draw since. A couple of attempts have been made to fix the phone but have been unsuccessful. I have insurance for it but they will wipe the phone and I do not want to loose all my pictures. I am not bothered about the phone being fixed as I can send this off, all I am wanting is the data recovered from it. All my pictures from my daughter being born to 18months are on the phone and I desperately don’t want to loose them.

Recovering the files from phones that have been submersed in water is a specialised job - there's a data recovery centre in Northampton that has a good reputation, and it's not that far to drive from either Luton or Milton Keynes to get there either.

I've been recommended to get in touch with Data Clinic (Chris Parry at Bury, his other half sent me) regarding a drive that's decided it doesn't like me! I've a Lacie 2 bug quadra USB3 6TB drive that has all my old weddings backed up as well as projects (over 2tb at least…I didn't keep track of TB more amount of weddings). Half way through consolidating a wedding project from Avid it said the MXF folder didn't exist and crashed the software. It opened again after but all the AvidMedia files folders were empty. Then I did a restart and it only came up as 'local disc' and now when I click on it it says 'R:\ is not accessible. The File or directory is corrupted and unreadable'. Annoyingly this is my newest and more expensive drive and I'd hoped it was ideal for a back up! I have all the footage on other drives but it'd take me weeks to reinstall 20+ weddings and consolidate them all again so I'm praying for a restore option… I look forward to hearing from you. I hope to call during little ladies nap time after lunch (hence the email now, I can't do important phone calls with a toddler!). Though feel to free to call before and I can try my best to answer!

I also have an external (another LaCie) hard drive that won't show or open on any macs. I can't view or retrieve any files. It looks to be a model from a company called 'wd'. I have it for years so it's pretty old – any chance you could copy the files onto a usb for me?

Sure that should be fine. The problems with your hard drives don't sound fatal and I'm confident that the files can be retrieved from both the hard drives you have.

Here's an interesting data recovery case I recently looked at.

2TB External Seagate Drive
1. Took hardrive out of desktop this morning and put it in my bag to use with my laptop later, I believe this may be when files were initially corrupted.
2. Tried to save a text file, on my laptop, on the external drive, and it gave error "The file is corrupted or unreadable"
3. Made copies of open text files in text editor and saved them. At this point I only suspected that my folder of text files was corrupted.
4. Came home and reconnected external hard-drive to desktop, tried to fix this issue, started following this guide: https://www.easeus.com/resource/file-or-directory-is-corrupted-and-unreadable.html
5. After navigating to the drive in command line I executed the command 'chkdsk /f f':
6. I think (not exactly sure on this step) I responded to a command that asked for a 'y/n' response with 'y'. I think it was asking for the drive to be unmounted? I don't really remember the details other than that I responded to a 'y/n' command.
7. Looked at the drive and saw that many files and folders were missing, not just the folder with text files. All of my folders in 'Skewl Documents', as well as many movies and a lot of music.
8. Started looking into fixing this issue with this guide: http://www.minitool.com/data-recovery/recover-data-after-chkdsk.html but decided against it, after remembering that I didn't have any drives bigger than 2TB to backup the corrupted drive to
9. Copied over the copies of text documents I made to desktop
10. Manually disconnected the drive as it refused to eject (although it always did this). My flatmate had told me it was better to eject it sooner rather than later as temporary files writing over the drive could overwrite some of my lost data.
11. After looking online I realise that my lost files may have been moved by the 'chkdsk' command into a hidden folder, with just the file endings being unrecognisable and they may be easily recoverable, but at this point I don't want to risk plugging it back in.

Laptop dead

My laptop suddenly went off last week, and since that was completely dead and unresponsive. I took it to AMRS (a liverpool laptop/apple repair shop) who told me it could be an issue with the logic board or the topcase, for which the repair would be around 800 so I decided rather than repair it to get a new laptop. However, I have loads of REALLY important files which I never backed up on that laptop, they are a couple of years work which I really can't afford to lose! The repair shop gave me a "Solid State Drive"/Flash Storage for the laptop with the data on and then referred me to you and said you should be able to retrieve the files from that drive. It may also be worth noting that when he plugged in the drive to his laptop and tried to run it on there, once I entered my password around half way through loading his laptop would shut down. I am desperate to get this data back so would love to come drop off the solid state drive for you to see what you can do with it.

Overheated laptop

My laptop overheated today and when I tried to load it I had the error message: 'Operating system not found'. I force shut down and let it cool but had the same error message each time I tried to power up. This has happened once before after overheating (two months ago), I was able to switch it back on after a few attempts and it has continued to work since then until now. It's a Sony Vaio PCG-3C1M. I got it in early 2009 so it's very old. I did a data backup a couple of years ago, but obviously I've added quite a few more photos and docs since then that I want to recover. The laptop itself has enormous sentimental value so if it could be brought back to life for use that would be incredible. I've removed the battery and left it alone because I don't want to cause any more damage. It would be great to get some advice

Power surge on PSU

There was a PSU problem which caused a power surge. The disk now does not work but you can hear it trying to spin up but no clicking. Its a Samsung SP200c 200Gb HD SATA and was wondering if you could quote me either for a fix or total recovery.

Need to recover RAW image files

I've been doing some travelling and copied over about 130gb of images to a lacie rugged drive. I safely ejected it and the next morning when I plugged it in it says that the drive cannot be recognised. I've run two software recovery programmes — the Seagate one and Data Rescue. Both took around 13hours to scan and then didn't bring up any of the latest data — just old images from another project. The drive initialises but won't mount. Is this something you guys could look into? I'm particularly looking for one folder ('canada') which has a substantial amount of .RAW images. They were all copied over beginning 14th September, but all that shows up are the really old things. If you could let me know what's possible and a rough estimate of cost that'd be great.

Card not compatible with computer

I have a MicroSDXC used in a camera and we have a problem that a large portion of our photos have vanished from our recent holiday. I am not sure what has happened. One minute they were there and then the card was saying that it wasn't compatible with my computer and then the camera in which it had previously worked. My girlfriend managed to get it to work on her ipad and has imported a lot of the phots but we are still missing quite a few and would like to have them recovered. I work very close to your Lombard Street location and could drop the SD card into the office in person and for speed.