DT1 · County Hall, Poundbury and the DT2 villages · Dorchester
Data recovery in Dorchester. The case-file RAID round the courts was set up years ago and never tested.
Dorchester is Dorset's county town. Dorset Council works from County Hall on Colliton Park, the Crown Court sits in the town, and round both are the solicitors, accountants, surveyors and planning consultants whose case files and drawings live on office servers and RAID boxes set up years ago and never tested. Poundbury, on the west side, is still being built — the Duchy of Cornwall puts it at over 260 businesses and completion in 2028 — and many of those businesses run from a laptop and a Dropbox folder that stopped syncing. Add the archaeology teams recording Roman Durnovaria on field laptops, the farms on the chalk downs with stewardship evidence on one office PC, and Coastland College's Kingston Maurward students with a term's project on a USB stick. There is no counter here; a failed drive leaves in a padded box, tracked and insured, for the Bristol lab. By road that is the A35 west to Exeter and the M5, or the A37 north to the A303 and the M5 at Taunton, and on the day the box arrives the diagnosis is free.
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What goes wrong in Dorchester, from County Hall to the downs.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A practice server by the courts that will not mount its array | Case-file and practice-management systems sit on RAID set up years ago and never tested | Switch it off; disks out, bay numbers on |
| A historian's single drive holding the manuscript and the scanned archive | Hardy scholars and local historians keep years of work on one machine, never copied off | Run nothing on it; post it untouched |
| An estate agent's two-bay NAS with one light red since the spring | Letting and sales offices in a town that never stops building keep the tenancy files on a box nobody checks | Power down before drive two goes |
| A farm-office PC on the downs, dead before the claim deadline | Cropping records, stewardship evidence and shoot-day paperwork on one desktop | Off at the wall; the tower travels whole or as its drive |
| A family's photo drive knocked off the desk | A single portable drive holds years of pictures until the first fall | Do not plug it back in; each spin now does damage |
Four things to know before the parcel leaves Dorchester.
Next to Dorchester.
Each town we cover →Asked from Dorchester, answered from Bristol.
Is there a counter in Dorchester, at Brewery Square or anywhere else in town?
No, and that is deliberate: one lab rather than a shopfront in every county town. Send it by Royal Mail Special Delivery from any post office counter in DT1, tracked and insured and with the shipping form inside; the return leg is paid by us. If you would rather carry it, the Bristol lab accepts a drop-off on any weekday — Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG, the lab of Bristol Data Recovery — and Dorchester West is on the line to Bristol. Nobody collects from Dorchester, and there is nowhere in town to meet.
Do you cover Poundbury and the DT2 villages, or only the town itself?
The whole town, Poundbury included — it is part of Dorchester, not a separate place — and the DT2 country round it: Kingston Maurward, Puddletown and Tolpuddle along the A35, Maiden Newton, and out to Winfrith. Weymouth to the south, Bridport to the west and Yeovil up the A37 each have a page of their own. Everything reaches us by tracked post, so a box from a downland farm is on the bench as soon as one from High West Street.
Our dig's site records and photogrammetry are on a field laptop that was dropped on site and now clicks. Is the season's work gone?
Usually not. A dropped drive is a drop case: leave it switched off, do not try it once more to see, and post it as it is. The engineer images whatever the heads can still read, works the remainder under read-only conditions, and the site records, the photogrammetry and the finds database come back on fresh media with a file list to check against your register. The band for a single drive is £300 + VAT, written down for you once the free diagnosis has been done and before any chargeable work — and that diagnosis tells you first how much the fall did.
Our Poundbury studio runs from one laptop, and Dropbox stopped syncing months before the laptop died. Is the cloud copy any use?
The cloud copy is whatever it held on the day the sync stopped; everything since exists only on the laptop. So treat the laptop as the one copy: leave it off, no reinstalling and no sign-in wizard, and post the machine or its drive. It is imaged read-only, the recovered files are listed with their dates so you can see what is newer than the Dropbox folder, and the lot is copied back on fresh media. Price: the single-drive band, £300 + VAT, confirmed to you in writing after the free diagnosis.
More like this in the casebook.
A padded box leaves Dorchester; a figure in writing comes back.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.