RG7 and M4 Junction 12 · Theale
Data recovery, Theale. Junction 12 made Theale what it is; the warehouses behind it run on one server each.
Theale is the motorway logistics-and-office edge of Berkshire, and it fails accordingly. The junction went in just east of the village when the M4 opened in 1971, took the through traffic off the High Street and brought the warehousing with it: stock and warehouse-management databases, telematics, gate and yard camera footage on a recorder, and a proof-of-delivery archive that exists in exactly one place, because a small operator runs one server in a partitioned office off the warehouse floor. Five business parks now surround the station — Arlington Business Park, next to Junction 12, opened in 1989 with eleven buildings round a lake — and with them come encrypted laptops, shared drives left behind after a cloud migration and a NAS bought by a team rather than by IT. Nokia opened its south-east office at Arlington in 2018. Behind the parks, the farms and estates of RG7 keep their claim records, herd books and field maps on a single office machine. There is no counter in Theale and no van. Post the drive tracked: the first look is free and the figure is fixed in writing before anything chargeable begins.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
Five faults RG7 keeps sending.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| A warehouse server that will no longer mount its volume | Stock, routing and proof-of-delivery records, held in one place only | Cut the power, number the disks by bay, post the drives bare |
| The one office PC in a partitioned office off the floor | A busy operator will run the same tower for a decade | Send the disks; the machine stays with your IT |
| An external drive that lives in the back of a van | Site photographs and survey files, and the only copy anyone made | Portable drives are the commonest arrival on this bench |
| A two-disk mirror running on one member since months back, unnoticed | The disk that failed first sent a warning nobody read | Both disks are imaged before any rebuild is attempted |
| A laptop that began clicking after a knock in the yard | Kit carried round a site all week takes more than it looks | Leave it switched off; every restart spends a little more of what is left |
From an RG7 counter to your front door.
Four questions RG7 puts to us.
Which places round Theale do you cover?
The whole of RG7 and the villages inside it: Burghfield Common, Mortimer, Silchester, Bradfield, Beenham, Woolhampton, Swallowfield and Riseley, along with the business parks either side of the station. Nothing is collected, so a farm office out past Bradfield reaches the bench on exactly the same terms as a unit at Junction 12.
The array stopped part-way through a rebuild. Power it off?
Stop it now rather than later. A rebuild has to pull every sector off every disk still standing, and that sustained load is precisely what finishes a second tired member; abandon one part way through and you can end up worse off than the original fault left you. So power down, write a bay number on each disk before it leaves the chassis, and post the drives bare. A NAS box is the exception — that one travels whole. Anything holding more than a single disk opens at £500 + VAT.
We have to be able to produce these records. What comes back?
Nothing is ever written back to the disk you post. What comes off it is a read-only image; every step after that happens on the copy, and your original returns in the condition it arrived in. You have one fixed price, in writing, before any of it begins. At the finish there is an itemised record showing which files lifted intact and which ones would not — the sort of paperwork an auditor or an inspector will ask you to produce.
How should I pack a drive before it goes in the post?
Movement is what does the damage, so deal with that first. Put it in an anti-static bag where you have one, then pad it on all six sides — or the drive's own box, if it has been sitting in a cupboard since you bought it. Send it tracked, insure it for what it is worth, and slip a printed shipping form in alongside. The posting page covers the remainder, and the leg home is on us.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Theale, on the same terms
Box it tightly in Theale; the look costs nothing.
Switch it off and leave it be. Then tell us how it was behaving at the point it stopped. Diagnosis is free, the figure arrives in writing, and nothing at all is agreed until you have read it.