RG21 to RG24, Viables to Popley · Basingstoke
Data recovery in Basingstoke. Six estates from one 1961 plan, and one copy of everything on them.
Burberry began in Basingstoke in 1856, but the town's shape is from 1961. On 31 October that year three councils signed an agreement for 11,500 new homes, to take a town of 26,000 people to 75,000 by 1976, and the estates laid out to employ them — West Ham, Bilton, Houndmills, Daneshill, Kingsland and Viables — are still where most of what reaches the bench comes from. Linde Material Handling's UK base is on Kingsclere Road, sales and service rather than manufacturing since 2009; De La Rue, the banknote printer, has its head office at Viables; an IT distributor whose stock-in-trade is the very disks and servers we recover is registered off the A33; and the small units around them do MOTs, joinery, print and CCTV. The borough stood at 185,200 people at the 2021 census. What fails is the workshop tower that runs the accounts, the transport office's one PC, the depot recorder, and the external drive in a spare room in South Ham or Popley. There is no counter in Basingstoke and no van. Send it tracked to the intake lab; looking at it is free.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
Five jobs that come up from Basingstoke.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A forklift engineer's laptop that stops at a black screen | Years of service visits and fault codes for a fleet of trucks, logged on it and never uploaded | Lift the drive out and post just the drive; the laptop stays behind |
| A dental laboratory's mill controller that will not start | The scan and design files for every case in progress sit on its one disk | Post the disk by itself and leave the mill bolted where it is |
| A NAS found unplugged in a store after an office move | Nobody put it on the new floor plan, and its last backup ran in the old building | Leave it off, every disk in its bay, and send the box whole |
| A print shop's RIP workstation that no longer sees its own drive | Every customer's artwork and the imposition files, on one drive, for years | Do not reinstall over it; take the drive out and post it |
| An external drive from a spare room on one of the overspill estates | The self-employed half of the household's client files, with the family photographs behind them | Unplug it at the first click, and it stays unplugged |
Four things to know before a Basingstoke parcel goes.
What gets asked from Basingstoke.
Do you cover the whole of Basingstoke, RG21 to RG24, Popley to Kempshott?
Yes, all four Basingstoke districts: RG21 for the town centre, Eastrop, Black Dam and Oakridge; RG22 for South Ham, Brighton Hill, Kempshott and Beggarwood; RG23 for Winklebury, Rooksdown and Oakley; RG24 for Popley, Chineham and Sherborne St John. Nothing is collected and no van is run, so a unit at Viables and a spare room in Popley are each one parcel from the bench, at one price. Post it tracked and insured on a working day and it is normally opened the next morning; the look is free, and we pay for the journey home.
The depot recorder has stopped and the insurer wants a clip off it. Can that be lifted?
Get the recorder off the mains first, whatever else is going on. While a recorder runs it writes new video over the oldest, and the clip you want is somewhere in that queue. Whatever was on the disk at the moment it stopped is usually recoverable, and it comes back as playable files with the camera and the recording time attached wherever the index still allows it. Whatever the recorder had already written over cannot be brought back by anyone, and nobody honest will tell you otherwise. A recorder is £400 + VAT, and the figure is written down before anything chargeable happens. Post the whole box, or lift the disk out and post that.
A NAS turned up unplugged in a store after the office move. Is it safe to power it up and look?
Not before you have rung. A box that was simply unplugged and shelved is usually a straightforward job. A box that had one amber light before the move will start rebuilding the moment it gets power, and a rebuild puts hours of continuous reads onto disks that have sat in a store for months, which is how a second member goes. Leave it off, keep every disk in its bay, and send the box whole in its own case; a NAS is the one thing we ask to have intact. If anyone remembers which bay had the light, write it on the lid. A job with a second disk in it starts at £500 + VAT, and the first look costs nothing.
Can a drive be handed over in Basingstoke, or in Reading on the way through?
No. There is no counter in Basingstoke and no public counter in Reading either. Every job goes to the intake lab — imagers, donor shelves and engineers under one roof — and a drive can go in by hand there on a weekday, at the address printed on the shipping form. Almost everyone posts instead: tracked and insured from any counter in the town, opened the next working morning, the look free, the return postage ours. Ring 0800 6890668 first if the shape is awkward and an engineer will talk the packing through with you.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Basingstoke, on the same terms
Post it from Basingstoke and the work starts the morning it lands.
Switch it off and keep it off. Then describe the moment it stopped — the noise, the message on the screen, the light on the front — because that is the most useful thing you can send ahead of the box. The look costs nothing, the figure is put in writing, and you say yes to it before any chargeable work starts.