EX17 · Lords Meadow · the Creedy valley · Crediton
Data recovery in Crediton. From the Creedy valley farms to Lords Meadow, the drive goes in the post.
Crediton is a Mid Devon town of around 8,000 in the vale of the River Creedy, where the A377 from Exeter to Barnstaple meets the A3072 to Tiverton. The bishops of Devon and Cornwall sat here from 909 until the see moved to Exeter in 1050, and the town still makes things: a dairy that has been independent of Arla since 2013 and says it takes milk from 94 farms, a family feed mill at Fordton going since 1964, a sweet maker founded in 1932, and the printing, engineering and vehicle-repair units at Lords Meadow. What fails here is working data — milk-recording files on a farmhouse PC, traceability sheets on a contractor's laptop, Sage on the one machine in a unit, coursework on a sixth-former's USB stick — along with the laptops of a young commuting crowd that meets the two trains an hour to Exeter. None of it needs driving anywhere. Box the drive well, post it tracked and insured to Bristol, and the diagnosis when it lands there is free.
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The five Crediton jobs we see most.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A farmhouse PC with the milk-recording files | Dairy herds fill the Creedy, Yeo and Taw valleys, many supplying the town's dairy, and the records live on one machine | Leave it off; the tower or just its disk can travel |
| The one PC at a Lords Meadow unit that runs Sage and the job cards | Printing, engineering and vehicle-repair firms on the estates keep the books and the workshop on a single machine | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A contractor's laptop holding batch and traceability records | Regulators expect food-plant suppliers to produce their paperwork, and it lives on one laptop | Stop using it; tell us the audit date |
| A volunteer's external drive with the scanned parish registers | Church and Boniface history groups digitise onto one disk and call it the archive | Image before anything |
| A sixth-former's USB stick that now asks to be formatted | Coursework from the town's 1547 school rides on a stick with no copy at home | Click no, unplug it, post it |
What happens to a drive posted from Crediton.
Just off Crediton.
All the towns we take →The questions Crediton asks first.
Which places round Crediton do you take drives from?
All of EX17: the town itself, the Lords Meadow and Fordton units, and the farms along the Creedy, Yeo and Taw valleys. Parcels also come in from the A377 villages out towards Barnstaple, the A3072 side towards Tiverton, the Dartmoor Line towards Okehampton, and from Exeter. Everything goes by post, so to us an address is only a postcode.
Is there a counter in Crediton where I can hand a drive over?
No, and that is deliberate: no counter in Crediton, no van, nobody collecting. The work is done at one lab in Bristol. Send the drive tracked and insured from any Crediton post office, or if you are going that way, drop it on a weekday at the Castlemead lab of Bristol Data Recovery — Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG. Either way the return leg is on us.
The batch and traceability records a food plant expects from us were on a laptop that won't start. Can they be got back before the audit?
Usually, yes. A laptop that won't start has normally lost its drive or its power, not its files. Send the whole machine switched off, or just the drive out of it, and it is imaged read-only first. That look costs you nothing, and it produces a listing of the recovered spreadsheets and PDFs to set against what the auditor asked for. A single drive is £300 + VAT. If the audit date is fixed, tell us on the phone and the job runs as priority.
A farmhouse PC with the milk records has died. Do we send the whole computer?
Either the tower or just the drive inside it, whichever is easier to pack. Leave it switched off; a disk that has started clicking gets worse each time it spins. Herd registers and milk-recording files are ordinary data, and once the drive is imaged they come back on a new drive with the folders as they were. One drive is £300 + VAT, the diagnosis costs nothing, and the return post is paid.
More like this in the casebook.
Post it from Crediton; the diagnosis comes back free.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.