RG9, Shiplake, Nettlebed and Stoke Row · Henley-on-Thames
Data recovery, Henley-on-Thames. Engines since 1906, boats since 1870, and a town where files exist only once.
Henley-on-Thames is a well-off town of about twelve thousand people (2021 census) with a short list of employers, and the work reflects it. Stuart Turner has built engines and then pumps in the town since 1906, from Market Place for most of that time, and is moving out of the town centre; Bremont builds watches in a 35,000 sq ft factory on the Reading Road; Brakspear runs its pubs from Bell Street; Invesco has a large fund-management office on the south side of town. Round them sit the advisers, accountants and solicitors a town this wealthy keeps busy, Ella's Kitchen in a barn on a farm outside Rotherfield Greys, the University of Reading's business school at Greenlands, and any number of spare-room offices and retired households in Shiplake, Nettlebed and Stoke Row. The regulated end of that looks after itself. What comes to us is one machine at a time: a stock server that did not start after a move, a pub's bookings and rota on one back-office PC, a solicitor's external drive, an iMac with the family's only photo library. Nothing is collected; the parcel travels insured and tracked to the intake lab, where the first look costs nothing.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
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Five jobs that arrive from Henley and RG9.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why the work comes to us | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A CNC controller whose internal drive the machine no longer sees | Years of part programs and offsets, on a disk nobody knew was in there | Send the drive on its own, with the controller's make and model written on the bag |
| A back-office PC behind the bar that restarts itself every few minutes | The bookings diary, the rota and the cellar stock, all on that one machine | Stop the restarts: off at the wall, disk out, disk in the post; the rest of the machine stays put |
| A solicitor's external drive that now asks to be formatted | Case files and conveyancing scans the office server never held | Say no to the format prompt, unplug it, and send it with its own cable |
| A portable SSD of packaging artwork and product video that mounts, then vanishes | Creative work gets versioned on the drive it was last edited from, and nowhere else | Stop plugging it in and out; post it as it is, cable included |
| A farm-office tower on the chalk that will not start the week the SFI claim is due | Accounts, field records and the gate-camera footage, on one disk since the day it was bought | Switch it off at the wall, unscrew the disk, and send only the disk |
Four things to know before it leaves Henley.
What Henley asks before posting.
Is Henley-on-Thames covered, and the RG9 villages out towards Nettlebed and Stoke Row?
Yes — the whole of RG9. That means the town itself, Shiplake on the road in from Caversham, Rotherfield Greys, Rotherfield Peppard and Stoke Row up on the Chilterns side, Nettlebed and Nuffield beyond them, the Hambleden valley villages with their Henley addresses, and Remenham across the bridge in Berkshire. Nothing is collected from any of them, so a farm office at Stoke Row and a flat over a shop on Hart Street are dealt with identically: tracked, insured post to the intake lab, a free look on the morning it arrives, one figure in writing, and the carriage home paid at this end. Sonning Common and Kidmore End are RG4 and sit with Caversham.
The server that runs the stock system did not start after we moved premises. Is it the disks?
Usually, yes. A machine that has run for years without ever being switched off will often not spin up again after a cold night in a removal van, and a RAID set that was already running a member short only says so once it is on the new floor. Do not keep restarting it, and do not let the controller rebuild. Take the drives out, pencil its bay number onto each label, keep the drive that failed first with the rest, and post the set bare; the chassis stays with you. Each drive is imaged on its own before anything is reassembled. One drive is £300 + VAT; anything holding two or more is from £500 + VAT, and the figure is fixed in writing before paid work begins.
The iMac holds the only copy of the photo library, and the Time Machine drive turns out to be empty. Can it be got back?
Usually. The iMac's own drive is the job. Post the whole machine in its original box if you still have it, or ring first: an engineer can explain how the drive comes out — on the models with a Fusion Drive, the hard disk and the small SSD have to travel together or neither makes sense. Send the Time Machine drive in the same parcel: a backup that stopped part-way still holds something, and the two are read against each other. A single drive is £300 + VAT, and that figure is put to you in writing before anything is done to it. Phones and tablets are not something this lab takes on.
Can I hand a drive over somewhere in Henley?
No. There is no counter in Henley and none in Reading. The engineers, the imaging rigs and the stock of donor drives share one building — the intake lab — and every job is worked there. Post the drive to it, tracked and insured, at the address on the shipping form, or take it in yourself on a weekday. The look is free, the figure comes in writing, and the parcel home is paid for at this end.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Henley-on-Thames, on the same terms
Box it in Henley, post it tracked, and the first look costs nothing.
Switch it off and keep it off. Then describe the fault — what happened at the moment it stopped, and which folders matter most. The look is free, the figure comes in writing, and no paid work starts until you have said yes to it.