If it is clicking, power it off now
A drive making a rhythmic click or beep is physically damaged and every additional minute of spinning grinds the surface your files are on. Do not run recovery software on it. Do not keep retrying. Unplug it.
Failed drives, deleted files, cards that will not read. Told straight: what is recoverable, what is not, and what it will cost before you commit.
If your drive is making a noise right now, switch it off and read the first paragraph below. Every minute it stays powered makes this harder and more expensive.
What you do in the first ten minutes decides how much is recoverable.
A drive making a rhythmic click or beep is physically damaged and every additional minute of spinning grinds the surface your files are on. Do not run recovery software on it. Do not keep retrying. Unplug it.
The single most common way people destroy recoverable data. Installing anything writes to the disk, and what it writes over is the deleted file you were trying to get back.
A file deleted an hour ago on a drive you have stopped using is very often fully recoverable. The same file after a week of normal use frequently is not. Speed matters more than anything else here.
Phone cards, camera cards and memory sticks usually fail electronically rather than mechanically, which changes the approach entirely — and often makes them more recoverable than people expect.
Very often the machine has failed and the disk inside is perfectly healthy. That is a twenty-minute job to confirm and it is the first thing checked, because it turns a frightening problem into a cheap one.
If files have been encrypted and there is a note demanding payment, that is not recovery, it is an incident. Do not pay anything before it has been looked at properly.
The drive is assessed first, and you are told honestly what the odds are. Some jobs are straightforward. Some need a clean-room specialist, and for those we work with Fields Data Recovery — Regan IT is accredited with them — rather than pretending a job is possible on a bench when it is not.
You get a price and a realistic expectation before anything is attempted. Nobody should spend £400 chasing files worth less than that, and you will be told when that is the situation.
Recovered data comes back to you on something you keep. Then the conversation nobody wants to have and everybody needs: what was not backed up, and why.
Backup afterwards is deliberately boring — something automatic, something off-site, and something that gets checked. A backup nobody has ever tested restoring is not a backup, it is a hope. For businesses this sits inside ongoing support.
Sometimes, but not on a bench — a physically failed drive needs a clean-room, and that is where the Fields Data Recovery accreditation comes in. What you get from me first is an honest assessment of whether it is worth sending, and roughly what it will cost, before you commit to anything.
Logical recovery — deleted files, a corrupted card, a healthy drive from a dead laptop — is charged at the normal £45 an hour and is often well under an hour. Physical clean-room recovery is quoted per job by the lab, and you will always see that figure before agreeing to it.
Stop using the drive, and get in touch. That is genuinely it. Deleted files sit on the disk until something writes over them, so the less the machine is used the better your chances. Do not install recovery software onto the same drive.
Three copies of anything that matters, on two kinds of storage, with one of them off-site — and a restore that has actually been tested. In practice that is usually a cloud backup plus a local copy, set to run without anyone remembering to do it.
One person does all of it, which is why nothing gets handed between departments. Start on the services page if you would rather see it all at once, or the web design page for sites and shops.
Slow machines, failing drives and the faults nobody else could pin down.
WiFi & networkingCoverage that reaches the whole building, designed by someone certified to do it.
Business IT supportOffice networks, Microsoft 365, security and someone who answers.
Microsoft 365Email on your own domain, licences bought right, accounts managed properly.
Logos & brandingLogos in usable formats, plus paperwork that matches the website.
Tell me what is playing up, or send me your web address. You get back one page: what is slow, what is insecure, and what Google cannot see. If the answer is that you do not need me, I will say so.