RG2, RG7 and Junction 11 · Shinfield
Shinfield data recovery. A card that mounts empty and a unit still working: nothing here waits politely.
Camera cards, DIT carts, scratch arrays and shuttle drives are the most time-critical media anyone sends us, and Shinfield is where they come from. Beside M4 Junction 11 stands Shadowbox Studios Shinfield: eighteen climate-controlled soundstages totalling 433,649 sq ft, two of them 41,000 sq ft with a 50 ft working height and described by the operator as the largest fully soundproofed, heated, air-conditioned stages in the UK, nine acres of backlot and thirty-eight workshops, all finished in spring 2024. On the same land, Thames Valley Science Park is owned outright by the University of Reading and holds around eighty organisations working in digital media, quantum computing, medical diagnostics and biotechnology. Beside them, two national museums are building permanent digitisation operations: the British Museum's Archaeological Research Collection took delivery of all 1.3 million objects by March 2024, and the Natural History Museum's collections, science and digitisation centre — 25,000 square metres, £201m of government investment — is due to be complete in 2027 and operational by 2031, holding about 28 million specimens, roughly a third of the Museum's collection. That is image data on a scale Berkshire did not have five years ago. Send it tracked. The first look is free of charge, and the price is settled in writing before any work is done.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
Five jobs this parish sends in.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A camera card that mounts empty | It came out of the camera before the last write had finished | Put nothing else on it and send the card as it is |
| A scratch array on an edit suite that has stopped | RAID 0 holds no redundancy at all, and the conform is due | Cut the power, label each disk by bay, post the disks |
| A shuttle drive that lives between unit and post house | In and out of a bag every day for weeks on end | Switch it off the instant you hear a click |
| A digitisation workstation that cannot see its own disk | Image sets produced continuously, with a catalogue waiting on them | Leave it powered down and send the drive by itself |
| A spin-out's NAS that has stopped mounting | Two years of research, bought by the team rather than by IT | Power it down and send the unit whole |
Four things production and lab work should know.
What Shinfield asks.
A unit is still working and the card will not mount. Can it be rushed?
Flag it as urgent when you book and that is how it is logged. It goes onto an imager the day the box lands, ahead of the day's other work rather than slotted between it, and as soon as the diagnosis is far enough along you get a completion date to plan around. Somebody answers the phone between 9am and 5:30pm on a weekday.
The card is the only copy. What actually happens to it here?
It is never written to. A read-only image is taken off it first, every attempt after that runs on the copy, and your original card or drive goes back exactly as it arrived. What we recover comes home on fresh media, with an itemised list of what read and what did not, which you check before any money changes hands.
What paperwork comes with the job? Production accounting needs it.
All of it, at no extra charge. One fixed figure in writing before anything chargeable begins, an itemised list of everything recovered for you to sign off, and a VAT invoice afterwards. Where a drive has to be opened, half is payable up front and that is stated in the quote rather than sprung on you later.
Do you cover Spencers Wood, Three Mile Cross and Grazeley?
Yes — the whole parish: RG2, the RG7 side of it, Ryeish Green and Shinfield Rise. Nothing is collected, so your address has no bearing on the price or on your place in the queue. Post the media tracked and insured; it gets a free examination the day it arrives, and the journey back is at our expense.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Shinfield, on the same terms
Send it from Shinfield and tell us the deadline.
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.