EX33 · Saunton, Croyde and the Great Field · Braunton
Data recovery for Braunton. Surf-school laptops, Great Field farm records and dune-survey cards, by post.
Braunton is a village, one of the largest in Devon — the 2021 census counted a little over 8,000 in the parish, with a parish council under North Devon Council — and the A361 runs straight through the middle of it between Barnstaple and Ilfracombe. West are Saunton and Croyde, two of the beaches inside North Devon's World Surfing Reserve, the UK's first, dedicated in May 2023; south lie the Marsh, the Burrows and the Great Field, still farmed in strips. That is who sends us drives: a surf school with its bookings and lesson footage on one laptop, a shaper with every customer template on the workshop PC, an ecologist with a season of dune surveys on a card that corrupted mid-write, a Great Field farm with its stewardship maps on the farmhouse laptop, a shift-worker from the Wrafton plant with a lifetime of photographs on a dropped external drive. No train has called since 5 October 1970 and there is no counter here; the drive makes its way to the Bristol lab as a tracked, insured parcel, and its diagnosis is free when it arrives.
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What tends to fail around Braunton.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A surf school's laptop that lives in the van | Bookings, waiver scans and lesson-camera footage on one machine that rides from beach to beach | Leave it switched off; post the laptop, or just its drive |
| A board shaper's workshop PC that clicks on start-up | The CNC shaping files and every customer's template sit on the one dusty machine that also drives the cutter | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A card that corrupted partway through a flight over the Burrows | Drone operators and dune ecologists carry a season's survey on one card until they are home | Say no when it offers to format; post the card exactly as it is |
| The farmhouse laptop with the Great Field's strip allotments on it | Stewardship maps and flock records for land still farmed in strips, with no copy anywhere | Image before anything |
| A start-up's pocket SSD holding its whole product shoot | A surf-brand start-up shoots its own catalogue and keeps every frame on one portable drive | Stop plugging it in to check; an SSD does not improve with retries |
Where a Braunton drive goes, and what happens to it.
Just off Braunton.
All the towns we take →The questions that come in from EX33.
I'm in Croyde, not Braunton itself. Does the parish boundary matter?
Not to us. Croyde is Georgeham parish with a Braunton post town, Saunton is Braunton's, Woolacombe is Mortehoe's; the page takes in all of EX33 — Braunton, Wrafton, Saunton, Croyde and Georgeham — and Heanton Punchardon next door, Chivenor's parish. Ilfracombe and Barnstaple have pages of their own. Since nothing is handed over locally and every drive goes by tracked post to Bristol, the boundary you live inside changes nothing.
The surf school runs off one laptop in the van — bookings, waiver scans, this week's lesson footage — and it will not start. What do we do this morning?
Leave it off and ring. A laptop that has spent a season on a van floor usually has a hard disk with damaged heads, and each attempt to boot scrapes a little more from the platters. Tell us the school cannot take bookings without it and the case is flagged priority before it is posted: opened the day it reaches Bristol and imaged read-only through our weekday hours. A single laptop drive is £300 + VAT, a figure you get in writing before we charge for anything; the diagnosis itself costs nothing.
Our surgery's NAS showed one disk as failed in the spring and nobody replaced it. Now the rota and the audit trail have gone. Do we swap the disk and rebuild?
No — a rebuild on a set that has now lost its second disk is the one step that can finish it. Power the unit down, pull each disk, mark the bay number on it, and post the bare disks to the Bristol lab, the one marked failed included; the enclosure stays in Braunton. The array is reassembled from read-only images on the bench, the rota and audit files checked against your list, and a two-disk set starts at £500 + VAT; nothing is charged until the free diagnosis has been done and you have the figure on paper.
Could I drop a drive off in Braunton, or over in Barnstaple?
No — deliberately. There is no counter in Braunton, none in Barnstaple, and no van; one properly equipped lab does the work. Pack the drive with padding on every side, tuck in a printed shipping form, and send it tracked and insured to the lab's address: Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG (Bristol Data Recovery). If you would rather see it handed over, the Bristol lab accepts drop-offs on any weekday. Either way it gets a case number, a free diagnosis on arrival, and the post back to EX33 paid by us.
More like this in the casebook.
Braunton to Bristol is the courier's run, not yours.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.