DT6 · the Brit valley and West Bay · Bridport
Bridport data recovery. From West Bay to Gore Cross, the failed drive goes to Bristol by post.
Bridport is Dorset Council's market town on the River Brit, inland from its own harbour at West Bay: the 2021 census put 8,205 people in the civil parish, around 20,000 with Bradpole, Bothenhampton, Allington and Symondsbury. The rope and net trade has not left so much as changed shape. AmSafe Bridport engineers airframe restraints and cargo nets from The Court on West Street, Huck Nets makes knotless sports and safety netting at Gore Cross, and that trade's design offices keep machine programs, net drawings and test certificates on workstations and small servers. Around them are the rigging workshops by the old ropewalks, Palmers brewing beside the Brit since 1794, the writers the Bridport Prize has drawn since 1973, the West Bay charter boats with plotter cards and engine logs in salt air, and the holiday lets and caravan parks with a season's bookings on one laptop. There has been no train since 1975, and no counter here. Tracked post takes a failed drive west along the A35 to Exeter and north up the M5 to the Bristol lab, and nothing is charged for the diagnosis when it gets there.
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Where Bridport keeps its files, and how they fail.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A net-design workstation that stops at a black screen | Knitting-machine programs, net drawings, test certificates and 3D models sit on the engineer's own machine, and the server copy is months behind | Off at the wall, and off it stays; the drive or the whole tower can travel |
| An architects' practice server that will not mount its array | Survey files and drawings for plots along the coast and beside the Brit live on one small RAID that an outside IT firm looks after | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A plotter card the West Bay boat's screen now refuses | Charter skippers and the inshore boats keep the season's marks, catch and effort records and the engine log on gear that lives in salt air | Take it out of the plotter and try no other reader; cards are £250 + VAT |
| A holiday-let owner's laptop holding the bookings and ten years of property photographs | Lets, caravan parks and the seafront cafés run the diary, the till and the photographs from one machine that nobody has copied | No reinstall, no recovery software; post it exactly as it is |
| An external drive of manuscripts and prints that has started to click | The writers the Prize has drawn since 1973, the painters and the festival organisers keep their archives on a shelf of external drives | Unplug it and stop; a click is mechanical, and every spin-up costs |
A Bridport drive's journey, in four parts.
Around Bridport.
Where else we cover →Asked from Bridport, answered from the bench.
Do you cover West Bay, Bradpole and Symondsbury as well as Bridport itself?
Yes: every DT6 address. The town, West Bay — which is Bridport's harbour rather than a resort in its own right — Bradpole, Bothenhampton and Walditch, Allington, Symondsbury and the farms up the Brit valley all post to the same bench on the same terms. Lyme Regis to the west, Dorchester to the east and Weymouth beyond it each have a page of their own. All of it has been Dorset Council's since April 2019, and no boundary makes any difference to the post.
Is there a counter in Bridport, or down at West Bay?
No. That is a decision rather than a gap: one properly equipped lab in Bristol instead of a counter in every market town, and no van or collection either. From Bridport a drive goes by tracked, insured post — Special Delivery over a Post Office counter, or a courier you have booked to the door. If you would sooner hand it to a person, Bristol Data Recovery at Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG accepts a drop-off on weekdays between 9am and 5:30pm. The diagnosis on arrival is free whichever way it travels, and it comes home at our expense.
The knitting-machine programs and net drawings for a job are on a workstation that has stopped. Can they be got back, and who sees them?
Usually, yes. Machine programs, drawings, test certificates and 3D models are files like any other; what hurts them is a repair tool or a fresh Windows put over the top, so leave the machine off. Post the tower, or the drive alone, and mark the shipping form as commercially sensitive. The case gets a number, the first thing done to the drive is a read-only image, nobody looks further into it than the job requires, and our copies are wiped thirty days after it is home in Bridport. After the free diagnosis, one drive is £300 + VAT.
My stock book and every photograph of what I sell are on a laptop that came off the stall onto the pavement. Is a dropped laptop worth sending?
Yes, and the sooner the better — provided nobody switches it on again to check. A drop damages a hard disk mechanically, and each further power-up can do more harm than the fall did; an SSD that stopped on impact has a different fault but the same rule. Box it as it is, say on the form that it was dropped, and the diagnosis when it lands costs nothing. A laptop drive is the £300 + VAT band, in or out of the laptop, and you see the list of what was recovered before you pay anything.
More like this in the casebook.
Pack it in Bridport. Everything after the postbox is ours.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.