TR13 · Porthleven and the Lizard · Helston
Helston data recovery. The firms around Culdrose, Lizard farms, Porthleven kitchens — one copy each.
Helston stands at the northern end of the Lizard Peninsula, on the River Cober — an old stannary and cattle-market town, run by Helston Town Council under Cornwall Council, the unitary authority. The 2021 census counted 11,611 people in the civil parish and 11,360 in the built-up area, so here the parish is the larger of the two. The town lost its railway back in 1962, and for sixty years everything has come and gone by road. RNAS Culdrose, one of the largest single-site employers in Cornwall, sits just outside the town; 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 nobody treated as a server. Most keep a single copy. Our bench is in Bristol, and post is how work reaches it. Ring first, label each disk with its bay before it leaves the machine, then send them together. The first look 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 shows up | Why it ends up here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A Porthleven harbour server that has lost its volume | One array, no spare, and years of catch records on it | Flag it urgent at booking, mark each bay, send the set |
| A Lizard farm office PC that quits before the desktop loads | Herd, spray and field records, and the accounts, on that one disk | Lift the disk out and send it; leave the tower behind |
| A solicitor's NAS that has quietly lost a disk | The front panel gives no hint the array is a disk short | Power it down before a second fails |
| A locked laptop, and the recovery key was never noted | BitLocker started at setup and the 48 digits went unrecorded | Chase the recovery key down first, through the Microsoft account behind the laptop |
| A shared drive where every file has stopped opening | Ransomware got in, and the backup lived on that same network | Unplug it from the network before anything, then 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 down the Lizard, with the farms and holiday lets in between. There is no counter to call at; media goes to our intake lab in Bristol. Send it tracked and insured, out on the A394 to the A30 and east. The free look is done the morning it lands, and postage home is on us.
The office has stopped dead. What turnaround is realistic?
Tell us at booking and it is marked urgent there and then. It goes on the bench the morning the box reaches us and is imaged before anything else waiting, and as soon as the diagnosis is clear enough you are handed a date to hold us to. Phones are answered 9am to 5:30pm on weekdays. The emergency page sets out what a rushed job actually turns on.
Should the RAID controller come with it?
Leave it in the machine. An array is put back together here in software, from images taken off each disk on its own, so the card is not wanted. Draw the disks out bare, write on each one the bay it filled, add the member that failed first, and let nothing rebuild itself.
Can I hand a drive in somewhere in Helston?
No — there is no counter in Helston, and none in Plymouth either. It is all handled at the Bristol lab. Either post it to us, tracked and insured, or hand it in at the lab yourself on a weekday; your parcel is opened on the bench the next working day. Nobody should drive the whole way there and back in a day.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to Helston, on the same terms.
Out of Helston in a box, home as working files.
Keep it powered down. Tell us how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has said what the fault is.