TQ13 · Heathfield to Haytor · Bovey Tracey
Data recovery for Bovey Tracey. The National Park is run from Parke; a dead drive is posted to Bristol.
Bovey Tracey, Buvvy to locals, calls itself the Gateway to the Moor, and the Dartmoor National Park Authority has its head office at Parke, the National Trust estate across the River Bovey. About 8,000 people live in the parish at the 2021 census, the houses and units at Heathfield by the A38 included. The pottery on Pottery Road closed in 1957 and House of Marbles has had the site since 1990; MAKE Southwest, at Riverside Mill, puts its membership at more than 250 makers. What the town keeps on disks follows from all that: drone imagery and GIS layers on hybrid-working laptops, makers' design files and Shopify exports, a till-and-stock server behind a shop, tachograph downloads on a Portakabin PC at a clay-haulage yard. There has been no station since 1959, and no counter here either: a failed drive is packed, handed over at the nearest Post Office counter and sent tracked and insured to the Bristol lab, while a RAID or NAS travels as bare disks, each labelled with its bay number. Diagnosis is free the day it arrives, and one fixed price follows in writing.
Talk it over with an engineer
0800 6890668
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, drone imagery and survey photographs inside | The park's head office is at Parke, and hybrid working leaves GIS layers and years of survey shots on one machine each | No reinstall, no reset; send the laptop whole or just its drive |
| A jeweller's laptop dead in the week of the Craft Festival | Makers who sell through Riverside Mill keep designs, product shots and the Shopify export on a single machine | Name the fair date; keep the laptop switched off until it ships |
| A two-disk server in an attraction's back room, tills and web orders on it | The town's shops and visitor attractions run stock and online orders on a box nobody looks at | Switch it off; send both disks, each labelled with its bay |
| A Portakabin desktop at a clay-haulage yard off the A38 | Tachograph downloads, weighbridge records and CAD sit on dusty PCs beside the A38, with no second copy | Do not clean it and try again; send the tower, or the drive alone |
| A heritage group's scanned photographs on an external bought in 2010 | Volunteers scanned the town's old photographs onto one drive years ago, and it is still the only copy | Unplug it and stop trying; every spin-up attempt wears it further |
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. The Bovey side of TQ13 is all one patch to us: Heathfield, Chudleigh, Moretonhampstead, Widecombe and the farms up towards Haytor, with Newton Abbot and Ashburton next door under their own pages. Everything moves by tracked post, so a parcel from Widecombe reaches the bench no later than one from the town centre.
Is there a counter in Bovey Tracey where I can hand a drive over?
No, and that is deliberate: one lab, no string of shopfronts. Pack the drive, send it tracked and insured from your nearest Post Office branch, or bring it on a weekday to the Bristol lab at Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG. The 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 holds only what it was told to sync, and plenty of people who moved here for the moor find the Desktop and Documents folders were never included. Log in from another device and look. If the files are not there, leave the Mac switched off and post it. A single drive, in the machine or out of it, sits in the £300 + VAT band, and the price is put in writing before a penny is charged.
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?
Stop turning it on. Each restart of a failing drive does a little more harm, and 'let's just see if it boots' is how single copies are lost. Write down the folders you need first, the product photography, the Etsy or Shopify export, the accounts, and tell us any fair or order date you are working to. A read-only image is the first thing made from the drive; nothing else is tried until that exists. One laptop drive is £300 + VAT.
More like this in the casebook.
One parcel down the A382, one written answer back.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.