Hard Drive RecoveryData recovery & digital forensics

Pricing

What it costs, before you have to ask.

Here is what recovery actually costs with us, before you have to ring up and ask. Nothing is charged until you’ve seen a fixed quote for your actual device and agreed to it.

How charging works

  • Free assessment

    You describe the failure, we tell you what’s likely recoverable and which band it falls in. In writing. No cost, no obligation, and no pressure.

  • Fixed quote before any work

    Once we’ve seen the device you get one figure and a list of what’s in scope. It doesn’t move afterwards.

  • No recovery, no fee

    If we can’t recover the data that matters to you, there’s no recovery fee. What “matters to you” is agreed in writing at quote time.

  • Per job, not per hour

    Recovery is priced as an outcome. Hourly billing only applies to forensic and expert work, where the hours are the deliverable.

Prices in AUD. Bands reflect the current Australian market for specialist recovery. We are not the cheapest and don’t try to be.
ServiceWhat it coversFrom
Deleted, formatted or corrupt (drive healthy)Files deleted, a drive reformatted, a partition lost, a filesystem that won't mount. The media itself is fine; the map to the data isn't.from $249
Failing or degraded drive (imaging required)Bad sectors, slow reads, drops out under load. Imaged region by region on hardware built for unstable media, worst areas left until last.from $449
SSD, NVMe and flashController and translation-layer failures. You'll get an honest answer early. TRIM means some SSD losses are unrecoverable by anyone.from $399
USB sticks and memory cardsCameras, dashcams, drones, phones. Includes carving for cards that no longer present a filesystem.from $249
RAID, NAS and serversArrays rebuilt from the member disks rather than trusting the controller that failed. Any filesystem, including ext4, Btrfs, ZFS and VMFS.from $690
CCTV, NVR and DVR footageProprietary recorder formats parsed directly from the disk. Priced on recorder type, number of disks and the time window needed.Quoted after assessment
Evidence-grade examination and reportingChain of custody, hash-verified acquisition, written report of method and findings, timestamp analysis. For insurance, disputes and legal matters.$195/hr
Cleanroom mechanical workClicking, seized or head-crashed drives need internal mechanical work in a controlled environment.Referred out, free of charge

What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable.

What “no recovery, no fee” actually covers

If we can’t get back the data that matters to you, you don’t pay the recovery fee. The important part is that “what matters to you” gets written down at quote time: the photo library, the accounts file, the folder with the job files in it. Success isn’t us deciding that a handful of random recovered files counts.

Two honest exclusions. Consumables are charged either way if they’re used: replacement media to return your files on, and return postage. And a written forensic report is separate work with its own value, so it’s charged whether or not the recovery succeeds, you’ll be told that before it’s started.

No recovery can be guaranteed before assessment. Anyone who guarantees one over the phone, before seeing your device, is guessing with your data.

Why it costs what it does

A failing 4TB drive can take days of supervised imaging — reading the healthy regions first, coming back for the difficult ones, and stopping when pushing further would do more harm than good. You’re not paying for minutes at a keyboard. You’re paying for a method that doesn’t make the situation worse, and for a record of what was done.

The cheapest option in this category is usually someone running the same consumer software you could have run yourself, on the original drive, which is exactly how recoverable data stops being recoverable.

Get a fixed price for your device