EX22 · the Square · the Ruby Country · Holsworthy
Data recovery, Holsworthy. The herd's paperwork sits on one farmhouse PC; the lab is in Bristol.
Holsworthy is a small market town in the far west of Devon — the 2021 census counted about 3,500 in the parish — where the A388 crosses the A3072, under Torridge District Council rather than West Devon. Wednesday is the week here: the livestock market on New Market Road — around 2,000 to 2,500 head a sale by its own figures, on a site opened in 2014 — and the pannier market in the Square from 9am to 2.30pm. The dairy farms that feed that sale keep their herd software, milk-recording exports and pedigree certificates on one farmhouse PC or a laptop in the parlour office, and that single copy is what this page is really about. Behind it come the vets, the agricultural merchants and the tyre and machinery dealers, each on one server nobody has looked at in years, and the family archives that arrive with retirees on the newer estates. There has been no railway since 1966, and no counter here either; the drive reaches our Bristol lab by tracked, insured post, comes home at our expense, and is diagnosed free of charge when it arrives.
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What goes wrong around Holsworthy.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A memory card holding the only pictures of St Peter's Fair | Four days in July, the Pretty Maid on the first — and one committee member's card has all of it | Take nothing more on that card; post it today |
| A vet's or merchant's office server that has stopped booting | Small practices, merchants and the medical centre's admin each run one box that was set up years ago and never looked at since | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A portable drive dropped while unpacking on one of the newer estates | People retire to Holsworthy, and the whole family archive comes with them on a single disk | Leave it unplugged; a knocked drive is not retried at home |
| The parlour-office laptop with the herd records | Herd software, milk-recording exports, pedigree certificates and the TB-test history — one copy, and the sale is on Wednesday | Image before anything |
| A contractor's USB stick that has stopped showing up | Agricultural contractors and hauliers run the office from a stick — invoices and tachograph downloads, no second copy | No repair tools and no format; it goes in a padded envelope as it is |
How a case gets from EX22 to Bristol and back.
Just off Holsworthy.
All the towns we take →Four questions from Holsworthy, answered straight.
Which places around Holsworthy does this page cover?
Holsworthy itself — the Square, North Road, New Market Road and the newer estates on the edge of town — and the farms and villages of the Ruby Country, the 45 parishes around Holsworthy and Hatherleigh. Bideford and Great Torrington sit under the same Torridge District Council; Okehampton has a page of its own. Where you are changes nothing: an EX22 farm lane and the Square post the same tracked parcel to the same bench in Bristol.
Our herd records are inside the farm software, not ordinary files. Can they come back, or only photographs and documents?
They come back. We image the whole drive rather than pick files off it, so the program's own database comes away with everything else — the herd software's data folder, the milk-recording exports, the scanned pedigree certificates. You reinstall the software on the replacement machine and point it at the recovered folder; the exports and the PDFs open as they always did. Tell us which package the farm uses when you ring and we will say which folders to check first.
The farm office PC is well over ten years old. Is a machine that age even worth sending?
Yes. Age is not what decides it; the drive inside is, and an old SATA disk is the most ordinary job on the bench. Send the drive on its own if somebody is comfortable taking it out, or the whole tower if not. Either way it is one drive, so the band is £300 + VAT, the diagnosis on arrival is free, and you get the price in writing before we begin anything that costs money. The one thing not to do is keep switching it on to see whether it has changed its mind.
Rather than post it, can I bring a drive to someone in Holsworthy?
No, and that is by design: one intake lab and no counters means nothing is handled twice. From Holsworthy the drive goes by tracked, insured post — padded on every side, the shipping form printed and put in the box, the tracking number kept. If you would rather carry it, weekday drop-offs are taken at the lab door: Bristol Data Recovery, Castlemead, Lower Castle Street — the postcode is BS1 3AG — in Bristol. The return leg is paid by us whichever way it arrives.
More like this in the casebook.
Wednesday is for the market; any weekday will do for the parcel.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.