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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 seaside resort and a working harbour with a population of 11,042 as of the 2021 census. The A361 does not pass Ilfracombe: the road (which passes through Barnstaple) terminates in the High Street. The town also had a railway station that closed in October 1970, and Pall's filtration plant has stood on the site since 1978; along with TDK-Lambda on Kingsley Avenue, that gives Ilfracombe, a seaside town, two regulated factories, each having their own corporate IT. Surrounding them are the individuals responsible for maintaining the only copy: the contract calibration engineer, the toolmaker located at Mullacott Cross, the technical author who works remotely from home using a single SSD, the guesthouse with its channel-manager export and VAT records stored on a ten-year-old PC, the skipper whose chart-plotter card resides on the boat, and the older resident who has decades of scanned photographs stored on a single external drive. No one collects anything, and there is no counter in Ilfracombe. Once you get a quote, via telephone or using the form, you pack your drive and post it tracked to our Bristol laboratory, or drop it off there, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no need for an appointment. The diagnosis, on the day your drive arrives, will be free.

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

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Five Ilfracombe jobs, and what not to touch.

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What's wrongWhy it's common locallyStep one
The external hard drive holding scanned pictures from an old family photo collection is starting to make clicking noisesOlder residents' family photos dating back decades were scanned onto one external drive but then were never backed up or duplicated anywhereUnplug it and do nothing with it; you will damage it each time it is turned back on (because the heads hit the surface)
The PC of a guest house, ten years old, has gone down during peak seasonChannel-manager exports and all VAT records have been stored exclusively on this single machineWe recover the data; your IT support rebuilds
An electronic chart-plotter card, taken out of a boat still wetSkippers' plotter cards and catch-logging tablets function all season long in salt sprayGet a quote first, then pack it as is, still wet. Don't dry it, and don't even try to get it into the plotter
A holiday park's two-bay NAS that has now lost its second driveThe first disk failed a year ago and was never replaced; the staff rota and booking history are on the remaining oneTurn off the power before getting a quote. Pull both disks if possible, and write “bay 1” and “bay 2” on each; otherwise the whole NAS comes. Never press rebuild
A care home's laptop that contains the MAR charts and the staff roster for the upcoming monthThe managers put them both on one device, and need the charts by the time of the next scheduled medication roundTurn it off, call us, and tell us when the charts will be required again
Posting it to us: get a quote first, by phone or with the form, then post it (with tracking and insurance) to our secure intake laboratory in Bristol. We will take care of the return postage. Please include the completed shipping form in the box as well. Alternatively, you can drop it off at our laboratory during the hours of Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed. Packing guidance can be found on our contact page.

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

The A361 to Barnstaple, the Link Road to Junction 27, then northYour parcel goes via tracked post, so you do not need a great deal of information about sending your data recovery job to our lab in Bristol, but to give an idea where the town is: if you are going out of Ilfracombe, take the A361 down to Barnstaple and follow it as it rounds the Western Bypass and onto the North Devon Link Road to travel east through South Molton to Junction 27 of the M5. Take the M5 north to Bristol Data Recovery: our lab is at Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG. When you telephone us for your quote, we can also discuss urgency and recommend what service would be best suited for your needs. If, once you have your quote, you wish to bring your drive into the lab yourself, drop it off at Castlemead any time Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. No appointment is needed.
Down in August? The queue reorders around youIf your guesthouse can't view its bookings, if your holiday park can't pay the seasonal staff or if your boat-trip office doesn't know who has paid for tomorrow, just tell us that on the first call, and we'll flag this as a priority. We assess the drive on the day it arrives in-house and image it during our Monday to Friday business hours. When you call to check on the progress of your drive, there will always be someone available to answer your questions about it.
Two bays, two labels, both disks in the boxThe park's NAS, a shop's RAID box and a rack server in a contractor's office are all units that should never go via the post whole (a NAS only if its disks cannot be removed from it). Once turned off, remove all disks, then label each disk with the bay number it was removed from (also note the bay number of the disk the box flagged as failed). Once you have received your price quote, please send the bare disks to us. At the lab we will image each individual disk and use these images to build up an identical array to what was lost, which is why we do not need the original enclosure or controller, and also why you should never press the rebuild button. For two disks or more, the cost starts at £500 + VAT.
A fixed sum in writing, and a VAT invoice for the accountantOne drive (hard disk or SSD) removed from a machine is £300 + VAT; one memory card or stick is £250 + VAT; the disk from your CCTV recorder is £400 + VAT. After we have carried out a free diagnosis for you, the figure for your case will be put into writing, and nothing will be charged until you have agreed to it. Once the work has been done there will also be a full VAT invoice for the books and a list of all the files that were recovered, for you to check against what you asked us to do. Return postage is always our responsibility. Once the drive has been back in Ilfracombe for thirty days, we will wipe the copies we used.

Around Ilfracombe.

Where else we cover →
Barnstaple → Braunton →

Asked from EX34, answered from the bench.

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

No, and that's on purpose. We have no counter in Ilfracombe, no van, and no one waiting to meet you in a car park. All of your money goes directly into the one lab in Bristol and the kit inside it. Get a quote before sending your drive, either via phone or through our online quote form. Package the drive and send it using a trackable delivery method to Bristol Data Recovery; the address is Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG. Bristol Data Recovery's lab is based at this location. If you are ever in Bristol, you may drop off your drive personally at Castlemead, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, without an appointment. Once it is signed for in Bristol, the free diagnosis begins that day.

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

Almost all the time. A dead controller, or its firmware, is what has failed when an SSD stops showing up in disk enumeration; the flash memory storage containing your data isn't what's gone bad. This means we can recover data from the flash memory even though there is no controller available to help. So stop powering it up to check: attempting to power up a failing controller each time you do so gives the controller itself another chance to get into an even worse state than it already is, by scrambling its own map. We will provide a quote for the recovery first, and then ask you to simply send over the SSD, without the laptop (storage soldered to the board inside the laptop is not taken on; if you are unsure whether your laptop uses removable storage or soldered-in storage, ring us first). This would count as one single drive, at £300 + VAT, and the price would be written down once the free diagnostic has been done and prior to any work being charged.

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

Only very rarely. The phrase 'Unreadable', or 'this card needs formatting', indicates your card's index is corrupted (i.e. the photos underneath are usually fine). Take it out of the camera and keep it separate: do not format it, or let a computer try to repair it, and do not use it for further photography. A memory card costs £250 + VAT. The memory card is imaged as read-only; the images are rebuilt from that image and then you will have a file listing to compare with the shot log from the day, prior to paying anything.

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

Yes. Mortehoe (which includes Woolacombe), Combe Martin and Berrynarbor are all individual parishes; however, they all share the EX34 postcode, and a parcel from any of these areas will be dealt with in the same way. Within the parish itself we take work from Hele Bay in the east to Lee Bay in the west. Braunton and Barnstaple each have their own page; the lab, the price bands and the telephone number are identical regardless of which 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.

Shut it down. Say what you think happened. Take no decision until the free diagnosis comes back.

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