RG4 · Caversham and Caversham Park Village
Data recovery in Caversham. Nothing from RG4 is enterprise; all of it is irreplaceable to one household.
Caversham has no business park, and that is the whole character of the work. There is a certain irony in it: BBC Monitoring worked from Caversham Park for seventy-five years until 2018, capturing, indexing and keeping other people's broadcasts, and the BBC Written Archives Centre is still on the site — while the town below it mostly keeps one copy of everything. What RG4 has instead of offices is independent shops on Prospect Street and Church Street, the Thames Path, the marina, and an unusually heavy concentration of consultants and senior professionals working from home. So the bench sees family photograph archives going back to the first digital camera, a NAS bought once for the garage and never checked since, external drives holding the only copy of scanned family papers, and live client work on a personal machine an employer's IT department has never seen. The station is a short walk over Caversham Bridge or Reading Bridge, but there is no counter to walk to, here or in Reading. Post it tracked instead: the first look costs nothing, the figure is put in writing, and on most jobs the bill only follows if the files do.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
What crosses the Thames from RG4.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| An external drive that has begun clicking | Every family photograph since the first digital camera | Unplug it now and then leave it strictly alone |
| A home-office laptop with live client work on it | Work an employer's IT department has never seen or backed up | Take the drive out and send that; the laptop stays |
| A NAS in a cupboard that lost a member disk months ago | Nothing on the front panel says the array is running short | Shut it down before another member fails |
| A laptop asking for a recovery key nobody has | BitLocker turned itself on at first boot and the 48 digits went unrecorded | Find the key first, starting from the account it was set up under |
| Every file in the shared folder now ends in an extension nobody recognises | Ransomware, and the only backup sat on the same network it reached | Take it off the network first, then see the ransomware page. |
Packing it so it arrives in one piece.
What Caversham asks.
Can I drop something in somewhere in Caversham?
No counter in Caversham — and none in Reading either. The imaging rigs and the donor stock all sit under one roof, so it is the disk that makes the journey rather than you. Send it to the intake lab, tracked and insured; an engineer has the box open the next working morning, the look costs you nothing, and the return carriage is ours.
It is family photographs, not a business. Is it worth doing?
Find out for nothing — diagnosis is free and you get a figure before you decide. A memory card or a stick is £250 + VAT, a single hard disk £300 + VAT, and you see a list of exactly what came back before any money changes hands. On most jobs, nothing is payable unless the data is recovered. We do not work on phones or tablets.
There is client work on it. Is the post safe?
Yes. Nothing on the docket carries your name or your client's — jobs run under a case reference instead. Only the parts of the disk a recovery actually needs are opened, nothing is passed to anyone outside the lab, and any working copy is deleted thirty days after your drive is posted back. The privacy policy sets out what is held, and for how long.
The NAS in the garage has been a disk short for months. What now?
Switch it off at the wall now, before a second disk follows the first, and let nothing rebuild. A NAS is the exception to the usual rule: send it whole in its own case, which is the safest way to move one, and do not take it apart. A server or a RAID set goes the opposite way: take the drives out and number them by bay as you do it.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Caversham, on the same terms
Take it to a counter in Caversham and post it tracked.
Power down and leave it be. Then tell us the symptoms — what it was doing at the point it stopped. Looking at it costs nothing, the figure arrives in writing, and you agree to that figure before any work happens.