TR26, Carbis Bay and Lelant · St Ives
Data recovery for St Ives. A gallery’s entire image library sits on one Mac up a cobbled lane.
St Ives had 10,748 residents in the civil parish at the 2021 census and 5,410 in the built-up area. The parish is the larger figure because it takes in Carbis Bay and Lelant as well as the town itself. Its market charter was granted by Henry VII in 1487, and it became one of the most important pilchard ports on the north coast of Cornwall long before the artists arrived. It is a working harbour and an arts town at once: galleries line the cobbled lanes of Downalong, painters and potters occupy studios above Porthmeor, there is Tate St Ives and the Leach Pottery, as well as holiday lets, harbour boat operators, cafés on Fore Street, and a surgery or two at the far end of the county. Almost everything in St Ives runs on either one office machine or a single back-office Mac: a stock database, a booking system, a card from a client's day, and the only scans of work already sold. There is no counter to call at, here or anywhere. Get a quote and then post it to us; the first look is free.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five jobs St Ives sends in.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What turns up | Why it ends up here | Where to start |
|---|---|---|
| A gallery Mac which won’t wake in the back office | The artist and stock database, the show images and the transparencies | Leave it turned off; before anything else the disk is copied read-only |
| A studio drive containing the only photographs of work already sold | A painter or potter’s records for ten years, stored on a single bus-powered disk | Don't turn it back on again. Get a quote, then send the drive whole with its lead. |
| A letting agency's server that has stopped mounting | Owner statements, guest records and the inventory photographs | Get a quote, then send the disks without their housing, each disk labelled by bay |
| A camera card that will not mount after spending a day in salt air | A wedding on the beach or a harbour shoot, none of it could ever be taken again | No reformatting: send it to us in exactly the same state as you found it |
| A harbour café's recorder that is unable to find its own hard drive | Cameras mounted above the counter continuously write to it | Unplug it, remove the hard drive, get a quote and post the hard drive on its own |
Four things worth knowing in TR26.
The questions St Ives asks.
Do you cover St Ives, Carbis Bay and Lelant?
Yes. TR26 covers the town, the harbour and Downalong, and reaches out to Carbis Bay and Lelant in the wider parish. None of that affects the price or your place in the queue, because we do not pick up anything to begin with. Once you have received your quote, your media goes to our Bristol lab by tracked post and is returned to you by the same route at our expense.
The gallery Mac will not start, and the image library lives only on it. Is it lost?
Usually not. The images and the stock database exist as ordinary files on that Mac's disk. What actually matters here is the disk itself and not the computer wrapped around it. Reinstall nothing, and do not let a repair shop try it first. Remove the disk from your Mac and send it on its own, telling us which software it runs. Macs with soldered storage (T2 and Apple silicon models) are not taken on; if you're not sure which kind you have, ring us first.
We are at the far western edge of Cornwall. How much does posting add to the wait?
Less than you would expect. Once your parcel has arrived, it is looked at the same day, and the one fixed price follows straight after. Typically deleted files, a formatted card or a damaged file system are back within a few working days. A mechanical fault waits for donor parts, so it runs longer. Either way, the first thing you'll hear is which of the two you have.
Can I drop my drive off somewhere in St Ives?
No. There isn't a counter in St Ives, and neither is there one in Plymouth. Get a quote, then send it to us tracked and insured, and we'll cover the journey home. If you don't want to post it, our intake lab in Bristol accepts hand-ins Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to St Ives, on the same terms.
Get a quote, then send it from St Ives, and we'll carry it from there.
Keep it unplugged. Let us know how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has told us what caused the failure.