TR26, Carbis Bay and Lelant · St Ives
Data recovery for St Ives. A gallery's whole 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. Henry VII granted its market charter in 1487, and it became one of the most important pilchard ports on the north coast of Cornwall long before the painters came. It is a working harbour and an arts town at once: galleries up the cobbled lanes of Downalong, painters and potters in the studios above Porthmeor, Tate St Ives and the Leach Pottery, and around them the holiday lets, the harbour boat operators, the cafés on Fore Street and a surgery or two at the far end of the county. Nearly all of it runs on one office machine or a single back-office Mac — a stock database, a booking system, a card from a client's day, the only scans of work already sold. There is no counter to call at, here or anywhere. Post it to us, and the first look costs nothing.
You will be talking to an engineer
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Five jobs St Ives sends in.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What shows up | Why it ends up here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A gallery Mac that will not wake in the back office | The artist and stock database, the transparencies and the show images | Leave it switched off; the disk is copied read-only before anything else |
| A studio drive holding the only photographs of work already sold | A painter or potter's record of a decade, on one bus-powered disk | Do not power it up again. Send the drive, or the whole machine. |
| A letting agency's server that has stopped mounting | Owner statements, guest records and the inventory photographs | Post them without the chassis, each one labelled with its bay |
| A camera card that will not mount after a day in salt air | A wedding on the sand or a harbour shoot, none of it to be taken again | No reformatting — the card travels to us just as you found it |
| A harbour café's recorder that cannot find its own disk | The cameras over the counter never stop writing to it | Unplug it, take the disk out, and post the disk 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 takes in the town, the harbour and Downalong, and reaches out to Carbis Bay and Lelant in the wider parish. None of that shifts the cost, or your place in the queue, since we collect nothing to begin with. Your media travels to the Bristol lab under tracked post, and it comes back to you by the same route, at our expense.
The gallery Mac will not start and the image library is only on it. Is it gone?
Usually not. The pictures and the stock database are ordinary files living on that Mac's disk, so what matters is the disk and not the computer wrapped around it. Reinstall nothing, and do not let a repair shop attempt it first. Send the disk, or the whole Mac, and tell us which program it runs.
We are at the far west of Cornwall. How much does posting add to the wait?
Less than you would think. A parcel is looked at the day it lands, and the one fixed price follows straight after. Deleted files, a formatted card or a damaged file system are usually back within a few working days. A mechanical fault waits on donor parts, so it runs longer. Either way, the first thing you hear is which of the two you have.
Can I drop the drive off somewhere in St Ives?
No. There is no counter in St Ives, and none in Plymouth either. Post it to us tracked and insured, and the leg home is ours. If you would sooner not post it, the intake lab in Bristol takes hand-ins on a weekday; ring first, and the packing can be sorted on the call.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to St Ives, on the same terms.
Post it from St Ives, and we carry it from there.
Keep it powered down. Tell us how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has said what the fault is.