TR13 · Porthleven and the Lizard · Helston
Helston data recovery. The companies based near Culdrose, Lizard farms, Porthleven kitchens: one copy per business.
Helston is located at the northern end of the Lizard Peninsula on the River Cober. It is an old stannary and cattle-market town, run by Helston Town Council under Cornwall Council (the unitary authority). The 2021 census reported 11,611 residents in the civil parish and 11,360 in the built-up area, so here the parish is the larger of the two. Since losing its railway in 1962, everything coming into and leaving Helston has done so by road. Just outside the town lies RNAS Culdrose, one of the largest single-site employers in Cornwall. The work we see is never the base itself but the firms around it: engineering, facilities and logistics SMEs, Lizard farms and flower growers, Porthleven kitchens and fishing businesses, and the solicitors, surveyors and estate agents with a small NAS that nobody treated as a server. Many of them keep only one copy. Our bench is in Bristol, and work reaches it by post. Ring first, label each disk with its bay before it leaves the machine, then send them together. Your initial inspection costs nothing.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
What comes in from Helston and the Lizard.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What turns up | Why it ends up here | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| A Porthleven harbour server that has lost its volume | Years of catch records on a single array, with no spare | Flag it "urgent" at booking. Label each disk with its bay. Send the complete set. |
| An office PC on a Lizard farm that fails before the desktop loads | Herd, spray and field records, and financial statements, on that single disk | Remove the disk from the PC tower and send it to us; leave the rest of the system behind |
| A solicitor's NAS that has quietly lost a disk | There is absolutely no indication on your front panel that your array is missing a disk | Power it down before a second fails |
| A locked laptop, and the recovery key was never noted down | When BitLocker was set up on the laptop, no note was made of the 48-digit recovery key needed to unlock it | First track down your recovery key through the Microsoft account linked to your laptop |
| A shared drive where every file has stopped opening | Ransomware got in, and the backup was on the same network | Take it off the network right away, then go to our ransomware page. |
Sending it out of Helston undamaged.
What Helston callers ask us.
Do you cover Helston, Porthleven and the Lizard villages?
Yes: Helston and TR13, Porthleven and Mullion, and the TR12 villages along the Lizard Peninsula, including the farms and holiday lets in between. There is no counter to call at; media items are sent to our intake lab in Bristol. Once you have your quote, please send the item tracked and insured, out on the B3297 to the A30 and east. The free look is done the morning it arrives, and the postage to send it back to you is included.
The office has stopped dead. What turnaround is realistic?
Tell us at booking and we will flag your job as urgent immediately. It goes on the bench the morning your package arrives at our lab and is imaged before anything else waiting. Once the diagnosis is clear enough, we give you a date to hold us to. Our phones are answered Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. Our emergency page sets out what a rush job actually depends on.
Should the RAID controller come with it?
Leave it in the machine. We rebuild arrays in software here, using images taken separately from each disk, so you don't need to send the card. Remove the disks bare, label each one with the bay it was in, add the disk that failed first, and do not let anything rebuild.
Can I hand a drive in somewhere in Helston?
No, we do not have a counter in Helston, nor in Plymouth. Everything is handled at the Bristol lab. Once you have received your quote, simply post it to us, tracked and insured. Alternatively, you may hand it in at the lab yourself Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed. Your parcel will be opened on the bench the next working day. Do not try to drive the whole way there and back in one day.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to Helston, on the same terms.
Out of Helston in a box, and back to you as working files.
Keep it unplugged. Let us know how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has told us what caused the failure.