PL21 and the Erme valley · Ivybridge
Data recovery, Ivybridge. The largest town in the South Hams, and the work comes home on one drive.
Ivybridge is the largest town in the South Hams, set on the River Erme at the southern edge of Dartmoor, with 12,484 people in the built-up area at the 2021 census. It grew quickly once the A38 Devon Expressway opened past its southern side in 1974 — from around 1,500 residents in 1921 to more than 12,000 now — because that road put Plymouth within an easy commute, and commuting is the substance of the place. A good deal of the professional work here is actually done in Plymouth, but kept on a home laptop, a NAS or an external drive at a PL21 address. Stowford Paper Mill, the town's anchor for 226 years, closed in 2013; the trade now is retail, education, the businesses out at Lee Mill on the western edge, and a great many young families whose photographs live on a single phone or laptop. When a disk gives out, send it in by tracked, insured post, and we will tell you for nothing what can be recovered.
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Five faults PL21 keeps sending us.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What shows up | Why it ends up here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A home laptop that will not boot, with the Plymouth work on it | The office is in the city, but the only copy sits at a PL21 address | Shut it down, leave it be, and send the whole laptop, not just the disk |
| The single tower a one-person business runs on | No server and no backup — one machine holds the accounts and the client work | Send the drive to us and let your own IT rebuild the machine |
| A DVR lifted from a unit out at Lee Mill | A recorder writes over itself, so the clip you want wears away first | Lift the recorder's own disk out and post that by itself |
| A farm-office NAS up the Erme valley that will no longer mount | A mirror can run on one disk for months before the second one goes | Power it down, number the disks in bay order, and send them bare |
| An external drive that began clicking after a fall at home | In a town this young, one drive can hold a family's whole photo record | Unplug it, do not run recovery software, and post the drive to us |
Four things worth knowing before you post from Ivybridge.
Four questions Ivybridge puts to us.
Do you cover Ivybridge itself and the villages around it?
Yes — the whole of PL21: Ivybridge and the villages around it, Brownston, Cornwood, Ermington, Modbury and Ugborough. Media goes to the intake lab in Bristol: post it tracked, or bring it there in person on a weekday. The first examination is free, made the day your parcel reaches the bench, and we meet the cost of sending it back.
The photographs of the children were all on it. Is there any hope?
Often, yes — a drive that clicks or will not mount is exactly the sort of thing we work on. The first step is a read-only image, so nothing we do adds to the harm, and the recovery runs off that copy while your original is left untouched. You get a fixed price in writing before it starts and an itemised list of what came back at the end. For households here, photographs are the commonest thing we get back.
The home NAS has started to rebuild and now it has frozen. Do I pull the power?
Yes. A rebuild makes the surviving disks read every sector, and that heavy read is often what finishes a disk that was already weak, so a rebuild that stalls can leave you worse off than the first fault did. Switch it off, note which bay each disk sat in, take them out, and send the bare drives. The enclosure can stay with you.
Can I bring the drive in to you somewhere in Ivybridge?
No — there is no counter in Ivybridge, and none in Plymouth either. Send it to the intake lab instead, insured for its full value and tracked, with a printed shipping form tucked in the box. If you would rather hand it over, the Bristol lab takes drop-offs on weekdays; ring first if it is an awkward shape and we will sort the packing on the call. Either way we cover the journey back.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to Ivybridge, on the same terms.
Box it up in Ivybridge and send it to the Bristol lab.
Keep it powered down. Tell us how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has said what the fault is.