TQ13 · Heathfield to Haytor · Bovey Tracey
Data recovery for Bovey Tracey. The National Park is run from Parke; a dead drive is usually posted to Bristol.
Bovey Tracey, locally known as "Buvvy", bills itself as the "Gateway to the Moor", and the headquarters for the Dartmoor National Park Authority are sited at Parke, a National Trust property situated across the River Bovey. The population of the parish stood at about 8,000 residents at the time of the 2021 census. Houses and units at Heathfield, near the A38, are counted within this total. The pottery located on Pottery Road ceased operations in 1957, and since 1990 House of Marbles has occupied this land; MAKE Southwest, based at Riverside Mill, states it has more than 250 member makers. The type of data retained by the town is a direct result of all that has been stated above: drone imagery and GIS layering stored on hybrid-working laptops; design files belonging to makers and Shopify export data; a server for till and stock management at a retail location; downloaded tachograph records stored on a Portakabin PC at a clay haulage yard. There have been no railway stations serving the town since 1959, and there is no counter service available here either. After a quote, failed drives are carefully packaged and handed over at the nearest Post Office counter for delivery to the laboratory in Bristol via trackable and insured post. Alternatively, you can drop off your drive at the laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed. Your RAID will travel as individual disks, each labelled with the number of the bay it was removed from, and similarly your NAS will also be posted as separate disks, unless its disks cannot be removed from the NAS enclosure. Diagnosis is free on the day it arrives, and one fixed price follows in writing.
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What fails between Parke and Heathfield.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A ranger's laptop that will not boot, with drone imagery and survey photographs on board | Parke (the park's head office) has hybrid working, leaving GIS layers and several years of survey images stored on one computer each | Don't reinstall or reset anything; once we have given you a price quote, send us just the hard drive. |
| A jeweller's laptop that died during the week of the Craft Festival. | Makers that sell their products via Riverside Mill use one device to house design information, product photographs and the Shopify export. | When you call for a price quote, name the fair date you are working to; do not turn the laptop on, and send just the drive. |
| A two-disk server located in the back room of an attraction, housing the tills and web ordering systems. | Shops and visitor attractions in the town are running their stock and online (web-based) orders from one server they never look at. | Turn this box off, then contact us for a quote before sending in the two drives, labelled to indicate which drive is from which bay. |
| A Portakabin desktop at a clay haulage site located near the A38 | Tacho downloads, weighbridge data and CAD files all exist on dusty old PCs by the side of the A38. There are no backup copies. | Don't bother cleaning it and trying again. Get a quote first, then send in the drive alone. |
| An external bought by a heritage group in 2010, holding scanned photos of its history. | Volunteers created one drive for the town's old photographs that were scanned years ago, and there are no copies left anywhere else. | Unplug it and give up trying; each time you try to spin it up you will cause even more damage. |
What happens after the parcel leaves Bovey Tracey.
By Bovey Tracey.
See the whole list →What Bovey Tracey rings us about.
Do you cover Heathfield, Chudleigh and the moor villages as well as Bovey Tracey?
Yes. Bovey's part of TQ13 is just one patch to us, and it includes Chudleigh, Moretonhampstead, Widecombe and the farms leading on to Haytor, and Heathfield (TQ12) as well as those; then there are Newton Abbot and Ashburton adjacent to this area but within their own pages. As for Bovey Tracey, we don't have a counter there. So after a quote, anything can be delivered via tracked post or can be hand-delivered to the Bristol intake lab (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed); therefore a parcel dispatched from Widecombe will arrive on the bench no later than one that was sent from the town centre.
Is there a counter in Bovey Tracey where I can hand a drive over?
No, and that is intentional: one lab, no string of shopfronts. Get a quote first by phone, or use our form. Then pack your drive and send it tracked and insured from your nearest Post Office. Or bring it to the Bristol lab at Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed. Diagnosis is free either way, and we pay the postage home.
My whole business lives on a MacBook with iCloud. Doesn't that mean it is backed up?
Check before you assume. iCloud stores only what it is told to sync, and many people who have moved here from other locations for the moor found that their Desktop and Documents folders were not included. Log in on another device and see if they are there. If the files are not there, leave the Mac switched off and get a quote first: we do not take the Mac itself, just its drive. Also, storage soldered to the board (T2 and Apple silicon MacBooks) is not taken on, so if you're not sure which type your machine has, please ring us first to confirm. One single drive falls into the £300 + VAT band, and the price will be put in writing prior to any charge.
I sell through the mill and online, and the only copy of my designs and product photos is on a laptop that will not start. What do I do first?
Do not keep starting it up. Rebooting a bad hard drive will slowly damage it each time, and 'let's just see if it boots' is how you lose your only copy. First write down the folders you need to access: product images, Etsy/Shopify exports, the accounts, and tell us whether there is a fair or order date you are working to. The read-only image of the hard drive is the very first thing created. We then do everything else after we have completed this. One laptop hard drive costs £300 + VAT.
More like this in the casebook.
One parcel down the A382, one written answer back.
Shut it down. Say what you think happened. Take no decision until the free diagnosis comes back.