Kingsbridge · TQ7 and the estuary
Data recovery, Kingsbridge. A town that runs on other people's seasons — nearly all of it on one disk.
Kingsbridge stands at the head of its estuary — a ria, with no river running into it, whatever the map suggests — and the town holds around 6,000 people, with 17,064 across the whole TQ7 district at the 2021 census. It is the service centre for this part of the South Hams: Fore Street and the Quay, the college, the farms, the holiday lets, the Salcombe boatyards and the shellfish exporters. Tourism is worth some £260 million a year across the South Hams and a tenth of all jobs in the district, and home working is unusually common, which means plenty of businesses on one machine. Send it tracked; the look costs nothing.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five faults the South Hams keeps sending.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What shows up | Why it ends up here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A NAS in a farm office that will no longer mount | It carries the accounts, the claim records and every field map | Switch it off, number the disks by bay, and post the drives bare |
| The one office PC that gave out mid-season | A busy yard will run the same tower for a decade | We handle the data, your IT the machine |
| An external drive holding every survey and drawing | The one copy anybody made, and it lives in a van | Portable drives are the commonest arrival here |
| A mirrored pair that has been running on one disk for months | The first failure raised a warning nobody was watching | Both disks are imaged before any rebuild gets attempted |
| A laptop that started clicking after a fall in the yard | Equipment carried round a farm all week takes knocks | Turn it off and leave it off — every restart costs you something |
A Kingsbridge job, counter to front door.
Four questions TQ7 puts to us.
Which places round Kingsbridge do you cover?
The whole of TQ7 and the villages inside it: Malborough, West Alvington, Loddiswell, Aveton Gifford, Kingston, Thurlestone, Chillington and Slapton. Salcombe, at the seaward end of the same water, comes in on identical terms, and so do Tavistock and Saltash away to the west.
The assurance records were on it. Will they read again?
The disk you send is never written to. A read-only image comes off it, all the work happens on that copy, and the original goes home as it came. One fixed price goes to you in writing before any of it starts. At the end you get an itemised record of what read and what did not — exactly the paperwork an inspector or an accountant asks for.
The NAS started a rebuild and has stopped dead. Power it off?
Yes. A rebuild reads every sector of the disks still working, and that is precisely the load which finishes a tired one, so stopping half way through can leave you in a worse position than the original fault did. Cut the power, number each disk in bay order, lift them out, and send the bare drives. Bristol has no use for the enclosure.
What is the right way to pack a drive for posting?
Stop it moving. Use an anti-static bag where there is one, then pad hard against all six faces, or reuse the original box if it survived. Post it tracked, insured to full value, with a printed shipping form tucked in beside it. The posting page covers the rest, and the journey back is on us.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to Kingsbridge, on the same terms.
Box it tightly in Kingsbridge and send it to Bristol.
Keep it powered down. Tell us how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has said what the fault is.