EX9 · the Otter estuary · Budleigh Salterton
Data recovery, Budleigh Salterton. The photographs, the family tree and the memoir are on one ageing laptop.
Budleigh Salterton is a small resort at the mouth of the River Otter: about 5,240 people at the 2021 census, a steep beach of Triassic pebbles, and one of the oldest populations in England. A family's photograph archive, genealogy project and memoir sit on one ageing laptop or in a drawer of external drives, and the person who set them up may not be around to say the password. Care agencies keep rotas and medication records on an office desktop with no IT department. The literary festival, the museum in a thatched cottage on Fore Street and the music scene hold catalogues and recordings on volunteers' home machines; photographers working the beach and the estuary keep the only RAW files in a damp studio. None of it is repaired in Budleigh itself. The railway closed in 1967 and its trackbed is the cycle path to Exmouth, so a failed drive travels by tracked post: the A3052 or A376 to the M5 at Junction 30, then north to our intake lab in Bristol, which diagnoses it free of charge the day it arrives.
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Five things that fail in EX9.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A retired household's laptop with a lifetime of photographs and the family tree | Nearly half the town is past retirement age, and the archive lives on one old machine with no second copy | Stop restarting it; leave it off and post it with any passwords you know |
| A care agency's office desktop that will not start on a Monday | Home-care agencies and care homes keep rotas, care plans and medication records on one PC with no IT department | Off at the wall, then ring and say the rotas are on it |
| A volunteer's external drive holding a museum catalogue or a festival's recordings | A literary festival, a volunteer-run museum and a busy music scene keep their archives on people's home machines | Run no repair tool on it; write down what it held and send it |
| A land-college student's USB stick, the dissertation on it and nowhere else | Dissertations and equine and animal-management records travel between Bicton and home on sticks and phones | Do not format it when the computer offers to; box it small and post it |
| A solicitor's or estate agent's office server showing a second amber light | Retirement property keeps a run of small professional firms in the town, each on one ageing server with the client files | Power it down; pull each disk, label it with its bay number, and send the failed one too |
From EX9 to the bench and home again.
Next to Budleigh Salterton.
Each town we cover →Four questions from EX9.
Which places does this Budleigh Salterton page cover?
All of EX9 — Budleigh Salterton itself, East Budleigh and Otterton up the Otter valley, Bicton and Ladram Bay — and the lanes across to Newton Poppleford and Woodbury. Exmouth, Sidmouth and Ottery St Mary have pages of their own, but the service is the same one — the drive is posted, and the free diagnosis follows.
Is there anywhere in Budleigh Salterton to hand a drive over?
No, and that is deliberate: there is no counter in Budleigh, no van and nobody who collects. Every drive is worked on at one intake lab, Bristol Data Recovery at Castlemead, on Lower Castle Street in Bristol, BS1 3AG. Send it by Royal Mail Special Delivery, or by any courier that tracks it, or take it to Castlemead in person on a weekday; it comes back to you at our expense whichever way it went.
My late father's laptop holds the family photographs and nobody knows his password. Can anything be done?
Usually, yes. A login password on its own does not stop us: the disk is imaged read-only and the photographs, the family-history files and the documents are read straight from that copy. What does matter is encryption — BitLocker on a Windows machine, FileVault on a Mac — and for that we need the recovery key, which is often sitting in his Microsoft or Apple account. Stop trying passwords at the machine; keep it powered off and send it on with whatever notes and keys you can find.
We run a care agency in Budleigh and the office PC with the rotas and MAR sheets will not start. What happens this morning?
Switch it off at the wall, then ring us and say that care is being delivered off that machine: a business that has stopped is flagged priority and looked at the day the parcel lands. Care plans and medication records are personal data, so the drive travels tracked and insured under a case number, is worked on from a read-only image, and our working copies are deleted thirty days after it goes home. Ask for the fixed figure in writing before you decide anything.
More like this in the casebook.
From the Otter to Bristol is one tracked parcel.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.