EX15, Junction 28 and the Culm valley · Cullompton
Cullompton data recovery. Junction 28 is inside the parish; the lab is up the M5 in Bristol.
The M5 is within the parish boundaries of Cullompton: Junction 28 and the service area sit on the piece of land between the M5 and a rail line that hasn't had a Cullompton railway station since 1964. The population of the parish (or Cully, as the residents call it) was approximately 10,000 at the time of the 2021 census, which is an increase from 8,499 people living in the parish during the 2011 census. The population of the parish continues to grow. East of the M5, Culm Garden Village was designated by central government for a maximum of 5,000 houses in January 2017, and Culm Garden Village is currently at outline-application stage. The relief road from Station Road to Duke Street is intended to divert traffic away from the centre of the town; construction of this road has commenced, and it is expected to be completed sometime during 2028. What gets lost here, however, is working data: consignment records and tachograph download logs from a depot PC at Kingsmill, a drone survey on a site manager's pocket SSD, colour spec sheets for the town's coloured-paper trade, and a young household's family photos on a new-build NAS that have never been backed up. None of this is ever fetched: after a quote, it is sent north via tracked post along the M5 to the Bristol laboratory (alternatively, you may drop it off at the Bristol laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed), and there is no cost for diagnosing it there.
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What fails between the Culm and the M5.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A Kingsmill depot PC that wouldn't boot, with a week's tachograph downloads on it | Haulage and distribution firms based off Junction 28 use one office computer to store telematics data and consignment records | Off at the wall; get a quote first, then take the drive out and leave the tower where it sits |
| A site manager's portable SSD that doesn't mount any more | Drone survey, point cloud and drawing sets move from site to site in vans while the land east of the M5 is being measured up | Unplug it. Do not try to plug it into the USB port again |
| A print shop's external drive which stalls after reading, before trying again | All the colour specs (for the paper trade) and customer artwork are stored together on one drive; there isn't a second version of this data | Image it before it completely fails to read anything |
| A two-bay NAS (in a new-build home office) that reports a "degraded volume" | The average age in the parish is below 41. Young households will purchase a NAS to store their family photographs but never back them up | Turn it off. Get a quote first. Pull out both drives and write the bay number on the side of each hard disk. Alternatively, if they won't come out, you can send the whole NAS unit |
| A farmers'-market producer's laptop where all the recipes, the labels and the accounts are kept | This monthly market was started in June 1998, the oldest of the South West's farmers' markets, and its sellers operate everything off one computer | Don't keep restarting it; ring for a quote, then send us only the hard drive |
Up the M5 from Cullompton: how a case runs.
Near Cullompton.
Every Devon town we cover →What Cullompton asks before it posts.
Is there a counter in Cullompton, or one at the services?
No, that was intentional. Instead of running labs all around the country, we run one well-equipped lab rather than having an engineer sitting behind a desk in every town. Get your quote first (you can get this by phone, or alternatively fill out our quote form), then you may send the drive via a tracked, insured service from any post office in Cullompton. Alternatively, if you prefer, you are welcome to bring it in personally, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed, to Bristol Data Recovery's lab, located at Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG, in Bristol. No collections will be made, and nothing will be collected from Junction 28.
Which places around Cullompton do you take work from?
All of EX15: the town, the village of Willand to the north, the units at Kingsmill, the farms that run down the length of the Culm valley, and eventually anything they may build on the east side of the motorway. The towns of Tiverton and Honiton each have their own page. There are no counters at Cullompton, so after a quote every delivery will be made via trackable post or dropped off at the Bristol intake laboratory (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed), which means the furthest part of the parish is no farther from the bench than the B3181 is.
Our depot PC at Kingsmill holds the tachograph downloads and the consignment records. Can they come back?
Usually. The disk is imaged in read-only mode before we do anything else, so we will be able to get your download files and whatever your transport software wrote from the copy rather than from the faulty drive. Leave the machine switched off, and when you phone, tell us what your software is called and whether it booted up or failed to do so. The free diagnosis comes first; then, once we have completed our diagnosis, we will put the price for one drive, £300 + VAT, in writing, and this price will remain the same.
A portable SSD from the site compound has stopped showing up. Is the drone survey gone?
It does not have to be. A portable SSD that disappears from your file manager normally means that either it has lost its controller (the brain) or the mapping it makes of the location of the data; the point cloud and the drawing sets beneath are often still intact. This is bench work, so plugging it into the van's USB port again won't help. Unplug it. Take note of which survey the programme is waiting on. Get a quote first, then post it. Tell us that there is no activity on site and the case opens as priority.
More like this in the casebook.
Cullompton to the bench is usually one tracked parcel.
Shut it down. Say what you think happened. Take no decision until the free diagnosis comes back.