TA20 · Fore Street to Millfield · Chard
Data recovery for Chard. No station since 1966, so the drive travels by tracked post to Bristol.
Chard is Somerset's southernmost town, 14,287 people at the 2021 census, at 121 m on the A30 close to both the Devon and the Dorset borders; the two streams on Fore Street drain to different seas, one to the Bristol Channel, one to the English Channel. Numatic, the firm behind the Henry vacuum cleaner, was founded here in 1963 and by the local press's count in August 2026 employs around 1,200 people on the Millfield industrial estate, so the data at risk is toolroom data: tool drawings, mould-flow simulations and inspection reports on the workstations and USB sticks of the toolmakers who supply the plant, CNC programs on one elderly PC in the smaller precision shops, tachograph and invoicing records at the haulage yards on the A30 and A358. Add livestock records on a Blackdown farmhouse laptop, rotas and care notes on a care agency's shared drive, and the museum volunteers' Stringfellow and lace-archive scans on an ageing external. With no station since 1966, nothing waits for a train: the drive is boxed and posted, tracked and insured, to the lab in Bristol, where the diagnosis on arrival costs nothing.
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What breaks between Millfield and Fore Street.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A toolroom workstation that stops at the boot screen, mould-flow runs and all | The toolmakers and CAD/CAM programmers who supply the Millfield estate keep tool drawings and simulations on one workstation, and workshop dust and vibration get inside it | Off at the wall; take the drive out of the tower and post it bare |
| The elderly PC that feeds a machine shop's CNC programs, refusing to start | The small precision shops on Chard's industrial estates run every program from one desktop bought when the machine was | No reinstall, no repair disc; leave it off and ring |
| A haulage office NAS on the A30 that has shown one bay amber since spring | Transport and pallet firms along the A30 and A358 keep fleet, tachograph and invoicing records on a two-bay box nobody looks at | Power down before drive two goes |
| A Blackdown farmhouse laptop that came off the seat of the pick-up | Livestock movement records and the evidence behind a grant claim live on one laptop that travels from kitchen table to cab | Leave it shut and unplugged; a dropped drive gets worse with every start |
| The museum volunteers' external drive of lace and Stringfellow scans, no longer mounting | Years of scanning the lace-industry archive onto one ageing external that is passed from laptop to laptop | Stop trying it in other machines; box it and post it as it is |
How a Chard drive gets to Bristol and home again.
Four things Chard asks before posting.
Is there a counter in Chard, or anywhere nearer than Bristol to hand a drive in?
No. There is no counter in Chard and nobody collects, and that is a deliberate choice: one lab with the right kit rather than a shop in every town. The drive goes to the lab by Royal Mail Special Delivery or by a tracked courier — the lab being Bristol Data Recovery's, in Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG — or you can carry it there yourself, weekdays only. It is given a case number when it is booked in, and the free diagnosis starts the same day.
Do you cover Ilminster, Crewkerne and the villages, or just Chard itself?
All of it, on identical terms, because every case travels by post: Chard and TA20, Ilminster up the A358, Crewkerne by way of Cricket St Thomas, the farms of the Isle valley and the Blackdown Hills, and the lanes down to the Devon and Dorset borders — Somerset Council territory, all of it. Yeovil, Taunton and Axminster have pages of their own; so does Lyme Regis, over the Dorset line. Wherever the parcel starts, the diagnosis is free, the price is one written figure and the return post is paid by us.
The only copies of a set of tool drawings are on a USB stick that now shows as empty. Is a stick worth sending?
Yes, and stop plugging it in first: every attempt to read a stick whose controller has failed makes the job longer. USB sticks and memory cards are £250 + VAT, and the diagnosis when it arrives is free, so a toolmaker knows the figure before deciding anything. The stick is imaged read-only and the drawings and mould-flow runs come off that image, not off the stick, and you check a list of the recovered files before paying anything.
A care agency's notes and rotas are confidential. Who sees the drive, and what happens to your copy afterwards?
The drive is handled under a case number from the moment it is booked in. It is imaged read-only, and each step of the work is done on that image, so the original is never written to. Care notes and rotas come back on the drive we return, tracked and insured at our cost, and the working copies at the lab are deleted thirty days after the drive is home. One thing worth knowing: the 'server in the corner' at a domiciliary agency is very often a single disk, which makes it a one-drive job at £300 + VAT rather than an array.
More like this in the casebook.
One parcel out of Chard, one written answer back.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.