EX39 · Long Bridge to East-the-Water · Bideford
Data recovery in Bideford. Twenty-four arches into town; one tracked parcel out to Bristol.
Bideford stands on the west bank of the tidal Torridge, around 18,000 in the parish when the 2021 census was taken, with East-the-Water over the Grade I Long Bridge and Torridge District Council at Riverbank House. The drives that fail here belong to the trades round that: a planning consultant with ten years of drawings on one external, a fabricator's stick of weld photographs for work at the Navantia UK yard at Appledore, downstream in Northam parish, a caravan-park office in Westward Ho! with the pitch ledger on an ageing tower, a photographer's card from an estuary wedding. Torridge District Council's own figures put the rise in over-65s at 30% between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, and much of what EX39 sends us is a retirement-age machine with no second copy of anything. No passenger train has left Bideford since 1965 and we keep no counter in the town either, so a failed drive is a parcel, tracked and insured, and it is the parcel rather than you that takes the A39 and the Link Road to the M5 and on to the Bristol lab. Diagnosis on the day it arrives is free.
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What Bideford loses, and what to do before it travels.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A planning consultant's external drive, ten years of drawings, now clicking | Riverbank House casework feeds a ring of one-person practices, each on a single unbacked disk | Unplug it; a clicking drive is imaged on the bench, never retried at home |
| A caravan-park office tower that stops at the maker's logo | Parks and lets in Westward Ho! and Appledore keep the bookings and the pitch ledger on one ageing PC | Leave it off and skip the startup repair |
| A USB stick from an overall pocket that asks to be formatted | Fabricators, marine electricians and NDT inspectors round the Appledore yard carry weld photographs and certificate scans on a stick | Say no to the format; post the stick as it is |
| A wedding card that reads 0 bytes back at the desk | Estuary and wedding photographers fill a card in a day, and nothing else holds those frames | Take the card out and shoot the next job on a fresh one |
| A chart-plotter card from an Appledore boat that no longer reads | The marks on it were never written down anywhere else | Do not let the plotter format it; send the card on its own |
A Bideford case in four parts.
Next to Bideford.
Each town we cover →What Bideford wants to know first.
Do you cover East-the-Water, Northam, Appledore and Westward Ho!, or only Bideford itself?
All of it. Bideford and East-the-Water, then Northam, Appledore and Westward Ho! over the parish line, Abbotsham and Instow, Landcross and down the A386 to Great Torrington, and out towards Hartland. Barnstaple and Holsworthy have pages of their own. Everything reaches us by post, so a drive from an Appledore cottage and one from Mill Street are the same job.
My laptop slid off the van seat on the way back from a site and it clicks now. Is the Revit model gone?
Usually not, provided it stays switched off from here. A drop like that tends to knock the heads, and every further power-up drags them across the platters, so no more attempts, no recovery software and no freezer. Send the laptop whole or take the drive out; the band is the same for one drive either way. The disk is opened on the bench, imaged read-only, and the model comes off the image, not off the damaged disk.
Is there a counter in Bideford where I can hand a drive over?
No, and that is on purpose. The work happens in one lab in Bristol rather than at counters, and nobody sits in Bideford for us. Send it tracked and insured from whichever post office counter in the town is handy — or, if Bristol is on your way, carry it in yourself on a weekday: Bristol Data Recovery, Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG, in the middle of Bristol. A case number follows on arrival, and we pay the postage home.
The PC with our holiday-let bookings on it is a big old tower. Do I have to post the whole thing?
No. If you or a handy neighbour can take the side panel off, the drive is the flat metal box with two cables in the back: unplug both, undo its screws, wrap it well and post the drive alone with the shipping form. If that sounds like too much, send the tower and we will lift it out here. The price is the same, £300 + VAT for a single drive whether it comes bare or inside the machine. Whichever you choose, switch it off now and leave it off.
More like this in the casebook.
Bideford needs a post office counter, not one of ours.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.