RG17 · Hungerford and Kintbury
Data recovery, Hungerford. The photographs are the stock; they sit on one laptop and one external drive.
Two trades in RG17 keep their whole value in image files, and both of them keep it thinly. The dealers inside Hungerford Arcade at 26-27 High Street, and the independent antique and interiors shops around it, run stock photography, catalogue and inventory databases, provenance records and valuation photography, generally on one laptop with a single external drive behind it — the pictures are the asset rather than a record of it. Up the valley, Lambourn — the largest racehorse-training centre in Britain after Newmarket — sends the racing yards' own kind of work, and has a page of its own. Behind both sit farm and estate offices, subsidy and herd records, and a town full of professional home-workers since the 1980s. With 5,869 residents at the 2021 census and no business park of any size, RG17 has very little in-house IT in it, which is precisely why so much of it sits on one disk. Post it tracked; the look is free.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
What comes in from RG17.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A dealer's laptop that will not wake up | Stock photography and the catalogue database, both on the one machine | Leave it off and send the drive, not the laptop |
| An external drive of valuation photography that has begun to click | Years of provenance images, with no second copy anywhere | Unplug it now; that noise is damage happening |
| A yard office PC that stalls before it finishes starting | Gallops telemetry, veterinary imaging and breeding records behind it | Ring us before anybody reinstalls anything over it |
| A NAS in the tack room that has stopped mounting | The office copy and the camera footage share the one box | Switch it off at the wall and send the unit as it stands |
| A card from a sale day that reads as empty | The card came out while the camera was still writing | Write nothing further to it, and send the card untouched |
Before the parcel leaves RG17.
What Hungerford asks.
Does an RG17 address cost more, out at the western edge of the county?
No. One price list covers everybody, Hungerford included. The look is free, and what follows it is a single written figure that then stays put: £250 + VAT for a card or a memory stick, £300 + VAT for one hard disk, and anything with several disks inside it — a RAID set, a NAS box, a server — from £500 + VAT. On most jobs, no files back means no bill.
The photographs are the business. What happens to them on the bench?
Nothing is written to your disk at any point. A read-only image is taken first, all subsequent work runs against that copy, and the disk itself returns exactly as it reached us. Every job carries a case number; an engineer opens only the files the recovery calls for; and any working copy still on our systems is deleted once thirty days have passed since your drive went home. The privacy policy sets all of it out.
The NAS in the office has stopped mounting. Do we take it apart?
No — a NAS travels whole, just as it sits, and that is the safest way to send one. Turn it off at the wall instead of leaving it to retry, and let nothing rebuild. Servers and RAID sets go the other way about: strip them to bare disks, each labelled with the bay number it came from. Ring us before anybody opens a chassis.
How does a drive get from Hungerford to the bench?
By post. There is no counter here and none in Reading, so hand it in tracked and insured at a counter in the town and it is normally opened the next working morning. If you would rather drive it, Junction 14 puts you on the M4 and the lab takes hand-ins on weekdays. Either way the first look costs nothing and we pay the journey home.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Hungerford, on the same terms
Post it from Hungerford and you get a figure in writing.
Switch it off and stop there. Describe what the drive was doing at the moment it failed. The look costs nothing, the figure arrives in writing, and no work is authorised until you have read it.