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 was set in 1961. On 31 October that year three councils signed an agreement for 11,500 new homes, to increase the population from 26,000 to 75,000 by 1976, and the estates designed to provide the employment (West Ham, Bilton, Houndmills, Daneshill, Kingsland and Viables) remain the source of most of what reaches the bench. Linde Material Handling has its UK base on Kingsclere Road, providing sales and service rather than manufacturing since 2009. De La Rue, the banknote printer, has its head office at Viables. An IT distributor that sells the very disks and servers we recover is registered off the A33, and the small units around them do MOTs, joinery, print and CCTV. At the 2021 census there were 185,200 people living in the borough. What fails is the workshop tower that runs the accounts, the transport office's single PC, the depot recorder, and the external hard drive stored in a spare bedroom in South Ham or Popley. There is no counter in Basingstoke and there is no van. Get a quote first, then send it by tracked post to the Oxford intake lab; the look 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 only shows a black screen | Fault codes and years of service calls for a fleet of trucks, entered on the laptop but never uploaded | Post just the drive from the laptop; do not include the laptop |
| A dental lab's mill control unit that won't start | All of the scan and design files for each active case are stored on its single disk | Send the disk alone, while keeping the mill bolted in place |
| A NAS found unplugged in a store following an office move | No one had put it on the new floor plan, and its most recent backup ran in the old building | Leave it off; remove the disks and label them by bay if they come out, otherwise leave the box whole |
| A print shop's RIP workstation that is unable to see its own drive | All of the customers' artwork and imposition files, on one drive, for years | Do not try to reinstall on top of it; remove the drive and post it |
| An external drive from a spare room in one of the overspill estates | The self-employed half of the household's client files, with the family pictures behind them | Unplug it at the first click, and then 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 of the 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. We collect nothing and do not run a van, so a unit at Viables and a spare room in Popley are each the same one parcel from the bench, and costed the same as well. Please get a quote first, then post it tracked and insured on a weekday, and it will usually be opened by the following 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?
Remove the recorder from mains power first, whatever else is going on. While a recorder runs it replaces older footage with newer footage, and the segment of video you want is somewhere in that queue. Whatever was on the disk when it stopped is usually recoverable, and it comes back as playable files with the camera and recording time attached wherever the index still allows it. Whatever the recorder had already written over will never come back, no matter who tries, and nobody truthful will tell you otherwise. A recorder is £400 + VAT, and the figure is written down before anything chargeable happens. Get a quote first, then take the disk out of the recorder and send that, not the recorder itself.
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 left on a shelf is typically an easy job. When power is applied to a box that had an amber light before the move, it can instantly begin a rebuild, and this puts hours of continuous reads onto disks that may have sat idle in storage for months, which is how a second member goes. Do not turn it back on. If the disks come out, send the individual disks, each labelled with its bay; if they do not, send the entire box in its own case. If anyone remembers which bay had the amber light, please make a note of it and include it in the parcel. A job with a second disk in it starts at £500 + VAT, and the initial examination is free.
Can a drive be handed over in Basingstoke, or in Reading on the way through?
No. There are no counters in Basingstoke, and there is no public counter in Reading either. All jobs go to the Oxford intake lab, where the imagers, the donor shelves and the engineers are housed together, and a drive can be dropped off there Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed, at the address printed on the shipping form. Almost everyone gets a quote first and sends it by post instead: tracked and insured from any counter in the town, and opened the next working morning. The look is free and we provide the return postage. If the item is an awkward shape, please call 0800 6890668 first so that an engineer can talk you through how to pack it.
If this is your fault too, Basingstoke reads on.
Next door to Basingstoke, on the same terms
Get a quote first, then post it from Basingstoke and the work starts the morning it lands.
Turn it off and leave it turned off. Then describe the moment it stopped: what noise did it make, what was displayed on the screen, what light was on at the front? That's the most useful piece of information to pass along ahead of the box. The look costs nothing, the figure is written down, and you agree to it before any chargeable work starts.