RG30, RG31 and Calcot · Tilehurst
Data recovery in Tilehurst. It costs nothing to find out whether it can be done.
A card or a memory stick is £250 plus VAT. A single hard disk is £300 plus VAT. RAID sets, NAS boxes and servers start at £500 plus VAT, and the look that tells you which band you are in costs nothing. That matters more here than in most places, because Tilehurst is a domestic and sole-trader patch rather than a business-park one: the dense strip of small firms along School Road and Chapel Hill, the garages and salons, the Calcot retail parks over on the RG31 side, and a great deal of housing behind both. So what fails is an accounts machine that is also the family PC, a booking system on one laptop, a garage's diagnostic and MOT records on a workshop tower that has never been backed up, card-terminal exports kept nowhere else, job photographs that are the only proof of what was done, and external drives holding family pictures, scanned papers and twenty years of correspondence. The name is the job, incidentally: tigel and hurst, a wooded hill where tiles were made, and the kilns at Norcot Hill, Grovelands and Kentwood peaked in the 1880s. Tilehurst made the bricks that built Reading. Post the drive tracked; the figure comes in writing before anything chargeable starts.
An engineer answers, and looking is free
0800 6890668
Five jobs that come in from RG30 and RG31.
Different fault? Begin at the triage →| What you are seeing | Why it lands on our bench | What happens next |
|---|---|---|
| The accounts machine that is also the family PC | Invoices, the VAT return and every photograph, on one disk | Keep it switched off; send the disk, not the tower |
| A garage workshop tower that will not start | Diagnostic reports and MOT records that were never backed up | Get the disk out of the case and post that alone |
| A booking and diary system on one laptop | Every appointment and every customer number sits behind it | Stop restarting it and ring before anyone reinstalls |
| A small branch back-office PC that boots to nothing | Stock counts, till exports and the card-terminal records | Cut the power and send the disk by itself |
| An external drive of family photographs that clicks | Twenty years of pictures and scanned papers, with no second copy | Unplug it now; each restart spends what is left |
Before you tape it shut.
Four questions Tilehurst asks.
There is no office in Tilehurst. Is that a problem?
No. There is no counter anywhere, in Tilehurst or in Reading. The bench, the imaging rigs and the donor drives are all in one place — the intake lab — so the disk travels and you do not. Hand it in tracked and insured at any counter in RG30 or RG31 and it is normally opened the next working morning. Return postage is ours.
A repair shop says the disk is finished. Are they right?
Often it is not. A repair shop exists to make a computer work again; lifting data off a disk that has gone quiet is a separate trade with separate kit. Drives written off elsewhere turn up here most weeks and image cleanly on the right rig. Since we charge nothing to assess one, asking costs you nothing either.
Does an RG31 address cost more than an RG30 one?
No. Postcode makes no difference to the price here. Assessment is free from any address, a single fixed figure is put in writing for you before anybody opens a drive, you are free to turn it down, and on most jobs nothing is payable unless the files come back. Return postage is ours wherever the parcel started.
It is personal rather than a business. Do you take domestic jobs?
That is most of the Tilehurst postbag — the family PC that also does the accounts, a laptop out of a spare room, an external drive of photographs. £250 + VAT covers cards and sticks, £300 + VAT a single hard disk, and you see a file list and approve it before paying. No phones and no tablets.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
Next door to Tilehurst, on the same terms
Post it from Tilehurst and pay nothing to find out.
Switch it off and stop there. Then tell us how it was behaving when it went. Assessment is free of charge, the price arrives in writing, and no work starts until you have said yes to it.