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EDR / Places we cover / Ilfracombe

EX34, the harbour and the end of the A361 · Ilfracombe

Ilfracombe data recovery. Two factories, a harbour and a summer season — one tracked parcel to Bristol.

Ilfracombe is a Victorian resort and a working harbour of 11,042 people at the 2021 census, and the A361 does not pass it: the road comes down from Barnstaple and ends in the High Street. The station closed in October 1970 and Pall's filtration plant has stood on the site since 1978; with TDK-Lambda on Kingsley Avenue, that gives a seaside town two regulated factories with corporate IT of their own. Around them sit the people who keep the only copy: the contract calibration engineer, the toolmaker at Mullacott Cross, the technical author working from home on a single SSD, the guesthouse with its channel-manager export and VAT records on a ten-year-old PC, the skipper whose chart-plotter card lives on the boat, and the older resident with decades of scanned photographs on a single external drive. Nobody collects, and there is no counter in the town. You pack the drive and post it tracked to our Bristol lab; the diagnosis, the day it arrives, is free.

Tracked in · return post free Diagnosis free when it arrives One written price, fixed

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Five Ilfracombe jobs, and what not to touch.

Not there? Head for the triage →
What's wrongWhy it's common locallyStep one
An external drive of scanned family photographs that has started to clickOlder residents scanned decades of prints onto one drive and never copied it anywhere elseUnplug it and leave it alone; every further spin-up scratches the platters
A guesthouse's ten-year-old PC, dead in the middle of the seasonThe channel-manager export and the VAT records were only ever on that one machineWe recover; your IT rebuilds
A chart-plotter card that came off a boat wetSkippers' plotter cards and catch-logging tablets work all season in salt sprayBag it as it is, still wet; no drying it out, no trying it in the plotter
A holiday park's two-bay NAS, the second disk now goneThe first disk failed a year ago and was never replaced; the staff rota and the booking history sit on what is leftPower it off, pull both disks, write bay 1 and bay 2 on them, and never press rebuild
A care home's laptop with the MAR charts and next month's rotaManagers keep both on one machine, and the charts are wanted at the next medication roundSwitch it off and ring; say when the charts are next needed
Posting it to us: send it to our secure intake lab — tracked and insured, the return leg paid by us — with the shipping form tucked in the box. Step-by-step packing advice lives on the contact page.

From the end of the A361 to Castlemead, and home again.

The A361 to Barnstaple, the Link Road to Junction 27, then northThe parcel goes by tracked post and needs none of this, but to place the town: the road out of Ilfracombe is the A361 down to Barnstaple and round the Western Bypass, then the North Devon Link Road east through South Molton to Junction 27 of the M5, and the M5 north to Bristol Data Recovery — the lab is Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG. Tell us on the phone how urgent it is and we will say which service to book.
Down in August? The queue reorders around youA guesthouse that cannot see its bookings, a holiday park that cannot pay the seasonal staff, a boat-trip office with no idea who has paid for tomorrow: say so on that first call and the case is flagged priority. The drive is assessed the day it lands, imaged across our Monday-to-Friday hours, and someone answers the phone when you ring to ask how it is going.
Two bays, two labels, both disks in the boxThe park's NAS, a shop's RAID box, a rack server in a contractor's office: none of them goes in the post as a unit. Switch it off, lift out every disk, write on each the bay it came out of (the disk the box has flagged as failed too) and send the bare disks. On the bench each disk is imaged and the set is rebuilt from those images, which is why the enclosure and its controller can stay at home and why the rebuild button must not be pressed. Two disks or more: from £500 + VAT.
A fixed sum in writing, and a VAT invoice for the accountantOne drive, hard disk or SSD, in the machine or out of it, is £300 + VAT; a memory card or a stick, £250 + VAT; a CCTV recorder, £400 + VAT. After the free diagnosis the figure for your case goes in writing, and nothing is charged until you have agreed to it. When the work is done there is a full VAT invoice for the books and a list of the recovered files, for checking against what you asked for. Return post is ours, and once the drive has been back in Ilfracombe for thirty days the copies we worked from are wiped.

Around Ilfracombe.

Where else we cover →
Barnstaple → Braunton → Minehead →

Asked from EX34, answered from the bench.

Can I hand a drive to someone in Ilfracombe rather than post it?

No, and that is by design. There is no counter in Ilfracombe, no van and nobody to meet you in a car park; every pound goes into one lab in Bristol and the kit inside it. Pack the drive, send it by a tracked service to Bristol Data Recovery — the lab is Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG — and the free diagnosis starts the day it is signed for. Anyone who happens to be in Bristol on a weekday can hand it in at Castlemead instead.

The SSD in my workshop laptop has simply vanished: no drive letter, nothing in the BIOS. Is anything left?

Almost always. When an SSD stops enumerating it is the controller or its firmware that has failed, not the flash chips holding your files, and the chips can be read around a dead controller. Stop powering it up to check: each attempt gives a failing controller another chance to scramble its own map. Send it bare or leave it in the laptop; either way it counts as one drive, £300 + VAT, with the figure fixed in writing after the free diagnosis and before any work is charged.

I shot a wedding at Tunnels Beaches and the card now says it is unreadable. Is the day gone?

Very rarely. 'Unreadable' or 'this card needs formatting' means the card's index has been damaged, and the photographs behind it are usually untouched. Take it out of the camera and leave it out: no formatting, no letting a laptop offer to repair it, no shooting on it again to see. A memory card is £250 + VAT. It is imaged read-only, the pictures are rebuilt from that image, and you get a file list to check against the running order of the day before anything is paid.

I'm in Woolacombe, not Ilfracombe. Does this page still apply?

Yes. Woolacombe, Mortehoe, Combe Martin and Berrynarbor are parishes of their own, but they share the EX34 postcode and a parcel from any of them goes the same way. Inside the parish itself we take work from Hele Bay in the east to Lee Bay in the west. Braunton and Barnstaple have pages of their own; the lab, the price bands and the phone number are the same whichever page you found.

More like this in the casebook.

Getting photos back → Water, flood & damp damage → External disks → All the areas we cover →

The A361 stops at the High Street. Your parcel goes on to Bristol.

Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.

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