Need your data back urgently? We can start today.
When a failed drive, SSD, RAID, Mac or phone is stopping your business or holding files you need today, choose our Emergency service. At our Sydney CBD, Rhodes NSW, Melbourne and Brisbane offices we can start the same day: bring the device in, ask for an urgent assessment and quote, approve Emergency service, and work starts straight away.
- Urgent assessment: a written quote in 1 to 2 hours for $150, or in 2 to 3 hours for $500 on RAID and NAS.
- Phones and tablets are a fixed price with no assessment. Emergency is $2,500 and work starts as soon as we have the phone and its passcode.
- After hours and emergencies: 0404 872 926. Business hours: 1300 444 800.
- Recovering data since 1998, with over 300,000 successful recoveries.
We never promise same-day completion. Some urgent jobs are finished within hours, others take days, depending on the fault. Your quote tells you the timeframe for your job.
Economy, Priority and Emergency
Every quoted job has three service levels. The success rate is the same on all three. Only the speed and the price change.
Economy
Our standard service and usually the best value. We work on your job in between Emergency and Priority jobs for other customers, so it takes longer. Most hard drive, SSD, USB and memory card recoveries cost $375 to $1,750 on Economy.
Priority
Your job goes ahead of Economy jobs and is worked on as fast as possible, normally during business hours.
Emergency
The fastest possible way to get your data back. Our data recovery engineers work on weekends and after hours and stop work for other customers to speed up your job. During business hours, Emergency prices on our price list start at $1,400 for a basic backup.
Some examples from our price list. All prices include GST. Turnaround times are estimates for typical jobs, counted from when you approve the quote, not guarantees.
| Job | Economy | Priority | Emergency | Turnaround (Economy, Priority, Emergency) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hard drive basic backup (drive still reads) | $375 | $550 | $1,400 | 5 to 10 days, 3 to 4 days, 1 to 2 days |
| Hard drive with damaged heads (clicking), up to 6TB | $1,750 | $2,950 | $3,500 | 2 to 3 weeks, 7 to 10 days, 2 to 5 days |
| SSD not detected (damaged controller) | $1,750 | $2,500 | $4,000 | 4 to 6 weeks, 2 to 3 weeks, 5 to 7 days |
| MacBook will not turn on, logic board work or suspected dead SSD | $1,100 | $2,000 | $3,500 | 7 to 14 days, 5 to 6 days, 1 to 3 days |
| Broken USB connector | $450 | $650 | $1,800 | 5 to 10 days, 2 to 3 days, 24 hours |
| RAID or NAS with one failed drive | $2,500 | $3,500 | $10,000 | 3 to 4 weeks, 1 to 2 weeks, 2 to 5 days |
| RAID or NAS with two failed drives | $4,500 | $6,500 | $18,000 | 3 to 4 weeks, 1 to 2 weeks, 2 to 6 days |
| Phones and tablets (fixed price) | $795 | $1,500 | $2,500 | 1 to 2 weeks, 4 to 7 days, usually within 24 hours |
On Emergency, phones and tablets are started straight away and worked on 24/7, usually finished within 24 hours, or 2 to 3 days for complex cases or a large amount of data. Every other device and fault is on our data recovery cost page.
The urgent assessment
For every device except phones and tablets, the assessment and written quote are free, usually within 1 to 2 business days. If you cannot wait, pay for an urgent assessment:
- $150 for a written quote within 1 to 2 hours, on every device except RAID and NAS.
- $500 for a written quote within 2 to 3 hours, on RAID and NAS jobs.
The quote tells you what is wrong, the price and turnaround for Economy, Priority and Emergency, and any attempt fee. Once you approve Emergency, work starts straight away. Phones and tablets have no assessment stage: the price you choose on the job form is the price for your job.
Most recoveries are no fix, no fee. Some complex cases have an attempt fee, then a completion fee only if the recovery is successful. You see your files before you pay.
After hours and weekends
Our business hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (some offices close at 5pm, see our contact page). In business hours all three service levels are available after the quote.
Outside business hours, at night, on weekends and on public holidays, you must choose Emergency service. After hours, Emergency usually starts from about $2,000, up to $4,000 to $5,000 for most devices, and $10,000 or more for RAID with several failed drives. If you would like Economy or Priority, please come in during business hours.
After hours and emergencies: call 0404 872 926. This number is for real emergencies only. If your job is not urgent, please call 1300 444 800 on the next business day.
- When you get through, you speak with a data recovery engineer, who can answer technical questions, give you a rough cost range and tell you the next steps.
- A non-refundable emergency assessment fee applies: $150, or $500 for RAID and NAS, the same as the urgent assessment. It pays for an engineer to come in, test your device and give you a quote. After it you must go with Emergency service, so only come in after hours if you are ready to approve it.
- Our staff may need 1 to 2 hours’ notice to reach the office, especially at night and on days like Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Australia Day and Easter. We will make an appointment and meet you there.
- Cannot come in yourself? Send it by Uber or a same-day courier at your own cost. For same-day or after-hours pickup you can use Interparcel, Zoom2U, Bonds, TNT, StarTrack, FedEx or DHL. Please research and pay for these yourself. If your device reaches us at 11pm on Emergency, work starts straight away.
The first hour, city by city
Sydney CBD, Rhodes NSW, Melbourne and Brisbane
Hand your device in, ask for an urgent assessment and approve Emergency service. Work starts straight away at that office. About 80% of jobs are worked on at the local office, including most hard drive, SSD, RAID, MacBook, USB and memory card faults, file system problems, bad sectors, firmware problems and damaged hard drive circuit boards.
Specialist cases go to our main lab in Rhodes NSW by overnight courier, at our cost:
- hard drives with damaged heads, which are opened in one of our two professional ISO 5 laminar flow cabinets (the old Class 100 standard);
- SSDs with a failed controller or NAND chips;
- phones, tablets and MacBooks that need logic board repair;
- memory cards and USB flash drives that need chip-off recovery.
Adelaide and Perth
Our Adelaide and Perth offices are secure drop-off offices. Our reception team packs your device and sends it to our Rhodes lab by Australia Post Express Post, free of charge. About 70% arrive the next business day, usually before lunch, and some take 2 business days. Work starts when it arrives. For a life or death emergency, submit a job, print the address label and send it straight to Rhodes with any courier. A next flight service from FedEx or StarTrack costs about $400 to $600 on average, at your cost, and is sometimes same day.
Auckland
Parcels go from our Auckland office to Australia weekly on Friday, at no charge. Choose Emergency and we send it to our Rhodes lab the same day, at no extra charge. For the fastest delivery you can also send it straight to one of our Australian offices yourself.
Canberra, Gold Coast, Newcastle, Wollongong and regional areas
We have no office in these areas. Most people send their device by Australia Post Express Post, which is affordable and reliable. Same-day couriers are available in some areas. If it is an absolute emergency and you live 1 to 2 hours’ drive from one of our offices, driving it in yourself, or asking a family member or friend to, is often the fastest and most reliable option.
What to do in the first 10 minutes
- Stop using the device. Every time a failing drive is powered on, it can do more damage.
- Do not panic. People make more mistakes when they panic. If you spilled a drink on a laptop, do not drop it while you dry it. After a power surge, disconnect the power and leave it alone, so you do not get hurt or cause more damage.
- Think about what was on it. Which files matter, and how old is the newest copy you might have?
- Check your backups. Look in Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Apple iCloud and any external backup drive. If a recent backup has everything, you may not need data recovery at all.
- Decide if the data is worth it. If there was never a backup and the files are important, a professional recovery is the safe option. If it only holds downloaded movies or games, it may not be worth paying for.
What not to do:
- Do not keep plugging in a clicking drive, do not run recovery software on it, and do not open it.
- Do not rebuild, initialise or format a failed RAID or NAS. Power it off and label each drive with its slot number.
- Do not charge a liquid damaged MacBook, and do not put a wet phone in rice.
Real urgent jobs
Real urgent jobs from our labs, each with a video:
- Broken USB flash drive, tax deadline today. An accountant needed the PDF files on a USB flash drive with a torn-off connector to finish a client’s tax work that day. After an urgent assessment and Emergency service at our Rhodes NSW lab, our engineer soldered on a new connector and she collected every file a few hours later.
- Clicking WD My Passport, 400GB of client shoots. A Newcastle photographer’s 1TB drive started clicking. The heads had failed. We replaced them with heads from a matched donor drive in a laminar flow cabinet and recovered all 400GB in one day.
- Lenovo SAP server RAID 5, business stopped. After a RAID 5 rebuild, SAP would not start. We gave an urgent assessment inside two hours, then on Emergency service recovered around 1.7TB and 10 virtual machines in under 24 hours.
- Failed VMware ESXi server, 8 SAS drives. A Sydney managed IT services company sent us the drives from a failed Dell server. We imaged all 8 drives, rebuilt the RAID and recovered the virtual machine files in 12 hours.
- Smashed and bent iPhone 12 Pro. Others had quoted several weeks. On Emergency service, logic board microsurgery and NAND chip reballing gave back all the photos and videos in about six hours.
See more in our case studies.
Frequently asked questions
We can start the same day at our Sydney CBD and Rhodes NSW offices. Bring your device in during business hours, ask for an urgent assessment, then approve Emergency service and work starts straight away. Some jobs are finished the same day, such as simple backups and broken USB connectors, but we never promise same-day completion. Your quote tells you the timeframe for your job.
Yes. Our Melbourne and Brisbane offices work the same way as Sydney: urgent assessment, approve Emergency, and work starts straight away. Specialist cases, such as damaged heads or chip-off work, go to our Rhodes NSW lab by overnight courier at our cost.
Yes, as Emergency service only. Call 0404 872 926. Outside business hours a non-refundable emergency assessment fee applies ($150, or $500 for RAID and NAS), and after it you must go with Emergency. Our staff may need 1 to 2 hours’ notice to reach the office, and after hours Emergency usually starts from about $2,000.
It depends on the fault. On Emergency, a hard drive basic backup usually takes 1 to 2 days, a clicking drive with damaged heads 2 to 5 days, and a RAID with two failed drives 2 to 6 days. Phones and tablets on Emergency are started straight away and worked on 24/7, usually finished within 24 hours. These are estimates, not guarantees.
During business hours, Emergency prices on our price list run from $1,400 for a basic backup to $4,000 for most single devices, and up to $18,000 for a RAID with two or more failed drives. Phones and tablets are a fixed $2,500. After hours, Emergency usually starts from about $2,000, up to $4,000 to $5,000 for most devices, and $10,000 or more for RAID with several failed drives.
$150 for a written quote within 1 to 2 hours, on every device except RAID and NAS. RAID and NAS urgent assessments are $500 for a written quote within 2 to 3 hours. The normal assessment is free.
No. The success rate is the same on Economy, Priority and Emergency. Only the speed and the price change.
No. Outside business hours you must choose Emergency. If you would like Economy or Priority, come in Monday to Friday during business hours, when all three options are available after the quote.
Our Adelaide and Perth offices send devices to our Rhodes NSW lab by Australia Post Express Post. About 70% arrive the next business day, and some take 2 business days. Work starts when it arrives. For a faster option, send it straight to Rhodes with a next flight courier at your own cost.
Yes, at your own cost. You can use Uber, Interparcel, Zoom2U, Bonds, TNT, StarTrack, FedEx or DHL. Please call 0404 872 926 first to arrange it.
No. We can often start the same day, but how long a recovery takes depends on the fault, and some jobs need donor parts or slow reading. Success cannot be guaranteed on any device.
No. We do not offer an on-site service. All work is done in our own labs in Australia.
Get a Free Quote
Your next step: submit a job, call 1300 444 800, or after hours call 0404 872 926 for emergencies only. For a price first, complete this form.
Phone: 1300 444 800 (within Australia)
After hours and emergencies: 0404 872 926
International: +61 2 80766079
Email: help@payam.com.au
