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.
Cullompton has the motorway inside its parish: Junction 28 and the services sit on the strip between the M5 and a main line that has had no Cullompton station since 1964, and the parish — Cully, to anyone who lives there — counted around 10,000 people at the 2021 census, up from 8,499 in 2011. It is growing still. East of the M5, Culm Garden Village was designated by government in January 2017 for up to 5,000 homes and is at outline-application stage; the relief road from Station Road to Duke Street, meant to take traffic out of the centre, is under construction with completion forecast for 2028. What gets lost here is working data: consignment records and tachograph downloads on a depot PC at Kingsmill, a drone survey on a site manager's pocket SSD, colour specifications for the town's coloured-paper trade, and a young household's photographs on a new-build NAS that nobody backed up. None of it is fetched: tracked post carries it northwards up the M5 to the Bristol lab, where the diagnosis costs nothing.
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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 depot PC at Kingsmill that stopped booting with a week of tachograph downloads on it | Haulage and distribution firms work off Junction 28 and keep telematics and consignment records on one office machine | Off at the wall, then out with the drive — the tower can stay |
| A site manager's portable SSD that no longer mounts | Drone surveys, point-clouds and drawing sets ride in vans between compounds while the land east of the M5 is measured up | Leave it unplugged; no more tries at the USB port |
| A print shop's external that reads, stalls, then reads again | Colour specifications and customers' artwork for the paper trade live on one drive with no second copy | Image it before it stops reading |
| A two-bay NAS in a new-build home office reporting a degraded volume | The parish's mean age is under 41; young households buy a NAS for the photos and never back it up | Power it off, pull both disks, write the bay number on each |
| A farmers'-market producer's laptop with the recipes, the labels and the accounts on it | The monthly market has run since June 1998, the South West's oldest, and its stallholders run everything on one machine | Do not keep restarting it; ring, then post the laptop or its 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 — on purpose. We run one properly equipped lab rather than a desk in every town. Post the drive from any post office in Cullompton on a tracked, insured service, or bring it yourself, on any weekday, to Bristol Data Recovery's lab, which is Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG, in Bristol. Nobody collects, and nothing is handed over at Junction 28.
Which places around Cullompton do you take work from?
All of EX15 — the town, Willand just to the north, the units at Kingsmill, the farms strung along the Culm, and in time whatever gets built east of the motorway. Tiverton and Honiton have pages of their own. Because everything travels by tracked post, the far end of the parish sits no further from the bench than the B3181 does.
Our depot PC at Kingsmill holds the tachograph downloads and the consignment records. Can they come back?
Usually. The disk is imaged read-only before anything else happens, so the download files and whatever your transport software wrote are lifted from the copy, not from the failing drive. Leave the machine switched off, and when you ring tell us the software's name and whether it was still booting. The free diagnosis comes first; the price for one drive — £300 + VAT — is then put in writing and does not move.
A portable SSD from the site compound has stopped showing up. Is the drone survey gone?
Not necessarily. When a portable SSD disappears from the file manager it has usually lost its controller or the map it keeps of where the data sits — the point-cloud and the drawing sets underneath are often intact. That is bench work; another try at the van's USB port will not change it. Unplug it, note which survey the programme is waiting on, and post it. Say the site is standing still and the case opens as priority.
More like this in the casebook.
Cullompton to the bench is one tracked parcel.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.