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 all of their value in picture files, and both keep it thinly. The dealers inside Hungerford Arcade at 26-27 High Street, and the independent antique and interiors shops surrounding it, run stock photography, catalogue and inventory databases, provenance records and valuation photography, generally from one laptop with a single external hard drive as back-up; the pictures are the asset rather than a record of it. Further up the valley is Lambourn, the largest racehorse-training centre in Britain after Newmarket, and the racing yards send their own kind of work. It has its own page on the website. Behind both sit farm and estate offices with records of subsidies and herds, and a town full of professional home workers since the 1980s. As per the 2021 census, Hungerford parish had a population of 5,869 people, and it has no large business park, so the town has very little in-house IT. This is exactly why so much of it resides on one disk. First get a quote by either calling us or using our online quote form. Then post it, tracked and insured, to the Oxford intake lab; we do not charge you anything to look at it.
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 won't turn on | Stock photos and the catalogue database, both on one device | Leave it off, get a quote, then post the drive, not the laptop |
| An external drive of valuation photography that has started making clicking noises | Years of provenance images, with no other copies anywhere | Pull the plug now; that noise is damage being done |
| A yard office PC that freezes during startup | Gallops telemetry, veterinary imaging and breeding records, all stored on it | Call us before anyone installs anything over it |
| A NAS in the tack room that has stopped mounting | The office copy and all of the camera footage are on this one box | Switch it off at the wall, get a quote, then post the disks labelled by bay, or the entire unit as it sits if you cannot pull them out |
| A card from a sale day that shows as empty | The card was pulled while the camera was still writing to it | Write nothing more to it; get a quote, then 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 applies to everyone, including Hungerford. The look is free, and what follows it is a single written figure that then stays fixed: £250 + VAT for a card or a memory stick, £300 + VAT for one hard disk, and from £500 + VAT for any device containing several disks, such as a RAID set, a NAS box or a server. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
The photographs are the business. What happens to them on the bench?
Nothing is ever written to your hard drive. First, a read-only image is made of the disk. Then every operation runs from that image, so that there are never any changes to the original. When your hard drive goes back to you, it will be in the same condition as when we received it. All jobs are given a case number. An engineer will only open those files required by the recovery. Any working copy that may still be stored on our systems is deleted 30 days after your hard drive went home. Please see our privacy policy for further details.
The NAS in the office has stopped mounting. Do we take it apart?
Only as far as the bays: if possible, the disks should be removed by lifting them from their bays, each labelled with the bay it came from. If that is not feasible, then the whole NAS will need to travel in one piece, exactly how it sits. Either way, simply turn the unit off at the wall instead of leaving it to retry, and don't allow anything to rebuild. Servers and RAID sets always go as disks: strip them down so that you have bare disks, each labelled with the bay number it came from. Before anyone opens up a chassis, contact us for a quote.
How does a drive get from Hungerford to the bench?
By post. There is no counter here and none in Reading, so it is recommended that you obtain a quote from us first, either over the telephone or using our quote form. Once quoted, you should take your drive to a counter in the town for posting (tracked and insured) to the Oxford intake lab, and it will normally be opened the next working morning. Alternatively you may wish to drive it to Oxford yourself; Junction 14 puts you on the M4, and drives may be dropped off at the Oxford intake lab Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, without an appointment being necessary. In both cases, the initial look is free and we will also cover the cost of the journey home.
Pick the one that matches, Hungerford.
Next door to Hungerford, on the same terms
Get a quote first, post it from Hungerford, and you get a figure in writing.
Switch it off and stop there. Describe exactly what the disk was being asked to do immediately before its failure. The look costs nothing. A figure is then supplied in writing, and no work is undertaken until you have read it.