West Devon · Tavistock
Data recovery in Tavistock. One laptop, no spare machine, and now it will not start.
Tavistock is a stannary town on the Tavy at the western edge of Dartmoor, 12,675 people in the parish at the 2021 census, with West Devon Borough Council run from Kilworthy Park in the town itself. The BID area alone holds around 300 businesses, three-quarters of them independent; a quarter of working residents are based mainly at home; and thirty per cent of the parish is 65 or over. Add the trades at Pixon Lane and Pitts Cleave, the farms across West Devon and the Tamar Valley, and the surveyors and land agents working to two planning authorities, and it comes to the same thing — one machine each, one disk, nothing behind it. Post it insured. Looking at it is free.
You will be talking to an engineer
0800 6890668
What comes in from West Devon.
Yours not here? Start at the triage →| What shows up | Why it ends up here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A land agent's desktop that died mid-sale | The file, the plans and the correspondence all on that machine | Leave it off and give us your completion date |
| A practice server that did not restart after the power cut | Year-end ledgers, client files and two decades of letters | We handle the data, your IT the machine |
| A shop recorder that has quietly stopped writing | The same disk is overwritten week after week until it fails | Lift the disk out of the recorder, then stop there |
| A farm office machine in a converted barn | Herd records, movement books and subsidy claims, in the damp | Corrosion is dealt with on the bench, never at the sink |
| A home-based consultant whose laptop dies at quarter end | No second machine, and nobody to hand the work to | Book it in and say what the deadline is |
Four points worth knowing here.
What Tavistock asks.
Do you cover Mary Tavy and Whitchurch as well?
Yes, along with Peter Tavy, Bradstone and Morwellham. The parcel does the travelling rather than you, so a lane on the moor edge is no further from the bench than a shop on Duke Street, and something posted on a weekday is usually there the next morning.
Can farm records and client files be got back?
Usually. Herd records, movement books, subsidy claims, scanned deeds and years of letters live on perfectly ordinary disks, and those fail in ordinary ways — heat, hours on end, a board that quietly gives up. Tell us which files the deadline hangs on, and those are the ones lifted off the image first.
It has wintered in an unheated barn. Is that a problem?
Tell us when you book it. Damp gets at a board a long time before anything looks amiss, and the kitchen remedies make matters worse — switching it on again and again, a hairdryer, a bag of rice, a shelf in the airing cupboard. Drives left strictly alone do best.
Where does a drive from Tavistock actually go?
To the intake lab at Bristol. There is no counter in Tavistock and none in Plymouth either. From here it is the A386 north to the A30, then east for Exeter and the M5 — no bridge and nothing to pay. Post it insured, or hand it in at the lab on a weekday. The look is free and the parcel home is ours.
Pages people open after this.
Next door to Tavistock, on the same terms.
Send it from Tavistock; it reaches the bench the morning it lands.
Keep it powered down. Tell us how it failed. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis has said what the fault is.