TQ5 · harbour to Berry Head · Brixham
Data recovery in Brixham. The auction is online; the paperwork behind it is on one PC.
Brixham is the southernmost of the three towns under Torbay Council and the fishing port among them: 16,825 people at the 2021 census, beam trawlers and inshore boats in the harbour, and a market its operator, Brixham Trawler Agents, calls England's largest by value of fish sold — £77 million in 2025, traded on a cloud auction. The auction is online; most of what surrounds it is not. Merchants and processors on the quay keep stock, traceability and invoicing on one office PC; skippers carry years of marks and catch records on a boat laptop that lives in salt air and vibration; the Brixham Laboratory's tenants at Freshwater Quarry hold monitoring datasets on small NAS boxes; surveyors keep boat reports and photographs with no second copy; and a large retired population keeps family history on ageing desktops. There has been no railway since 1963, and there is no counter here either; tracked post carries a failed drive out along the A3022 and A380 to the M5 and up to the lab in Bristol, and when it lands the diagnosis is free.
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What fails in Brixham, quay to Berry Head.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A boat laptop that will not start, with years of marks on it | The beam-trawler and inshore fleet keeps plotter cards, logbook exports and quota records on one machine that lives in salt air and vibration | Leave it off; post the plotter card in the same box |
| A merchant's office PC on the quay that stops at a black screen | The auction runs in the cloud, but stock, traceability and invoicing for the firms around it sit on a single ageing tower | Say the business has stopped; do not reinstall Windows |
| A two-bay NAS in a Freshwater Quarry unit with one disk marked failed | The laboratory's tenants keep environmental datasets and shellfish-farm telemetry on small boxes that were never copied anywhere else | Power down, pull both disks, label each with its bay, send both |
| A CCTV recorder from a harbourside guesthouse or restaurant | Guesthouses and the harbourside restaurants run bookings, the till and the cameras on as little kit as they can, and a recorder overwrites itself on a loop | Unplug it before the loop reaches the dates you need, and note them down |
| Decades of guillemot counts on a volunteer's USB stick | The Berry Head survey volunteers and the heritage museum keep scanned archives and survey spreadsheets on consumer drives | Stop using it; post it as it is — the £250 + VAT band |
From Brixham to the bench, and back again.
Close to Brixham.
Our whole patch →What Brixham asks before it posts.
Is there a counter in Brixham I can walk into?
No, and that is deliberate: the money goes into one lab and its kit, not into counters. A Brixham drive goes by tracked post from your nearest Post Office branch, or by a courier collected from the door. If you would rather hand it over in person, the intake lab in Bristol — Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG — takes drop-offs on weekdays. Either way the diagnosis on arrival is free and the return post is paid.
Which places around Brixham do you cover?
Every TQ5 address: the harbour and the town, Berry Head, and out to Churston and Galmpton. Paignton and Torquay have pages of their own, as does Dartmouth down the coast, but the service is identical from all of them. Brixham is Torbay Council's southern town, and the postcode changes nothing — the same free diagnosis, the same price bands, the same paid return.
The boat laptop will not start, and years of marks are on it. Can they be got back?
Usually, yes. Marks, electronic logbook exports and catch and quota records are files like any other; what is unusual is where the laptop has lived, on a working boat, so mention that when you ring. Do not try it again on shore power. If the marks are on the plotter card too, send the card in the same box: a card is £250 + VAT, a laptop drive £300 + VAT, and the free diagnosis comes before either.
Our shellfish telemetry sits on a two-bay NAS that now reports a failed disk. Swap it and rebuild?
No. Rebuilding onto a new disk is the quickest way to lose the data on the other one. Power the box down, take out both disks, mark each with its bay number, and post them as bare disks, never the unit — the disk it calls failed as well. The bench reads each one and puts the volume back together from images. From £500 + VAT for anything with two disks or more.
More like this in the casebook.
Post it from Brixham; the answer comes back the same way.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.