EX11 · the Otter valley · Ottery St Mary
Data recovery for Ottery St Mary. No station since 1967, so the drive travels by post anyway.
Ottery St Mary is a small school town on the River Otter: a civil parish of around 8,000 (2021 census), a church consecrated in 1260 that is often described as a miniature Exeter Cathedral, and The King's School, founded in 1545 by Henry VIII as the choir school and now teaching about 1,110 pupils. The drives that fail here belong to that mix. A sixth-former's coursework on a USB stick, the till and bookings machine at a garden centre with a restaurant attached, a joinery's drawings on one PC at Finnimore, horse passports and vet records up the valley, and decades of tar-barrel photographs on a family computer that will not start. None of it needs a counter in Ottery, and there is not one. Boxed with padding on all sides, the drive travels to our Bristol lab by Royal Mail Special Delivery, or with any courier that tracks it, and we pay the return leg. Nothing is charged until you have a single fixed price in writing, and the diagnosis that produces it is free the day the parcel arrives.
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The jobs Ottery St Mary sends us.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A wedding photographer's card that reads as blank after Cadhay | Weddings at Cadhay and St Mary's leave with the day's only copy on one card | Take it out of the camera and shoot nothing else on it |
| The back-office server at a garden centre with a restaurant | Tills, stock, the staff rota and the event diary all on one box | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A local-history group's laptop with the whole archive on it | Church, choir and parish records exist as scans on one volunteer's machine | Leave it off, and decline the disk check Windows will offer |
| An equestrian yard's laptop from up the Otter valley | Horse passports, livestock and vet records kept on one machine, nothing off-site | Image before anything |
| The only PC in a joinery unit at Finnimore | Drawings and every invoice since the firm opened, on a single disk in the old station yard | Do not run a recovery program on it; the drive travels on its own |
From Ottery St Mary to the bench and back.
Near Ottery St Mary.
Every Devon town we cover →What people in Ottery St Mary ask us.
Do you cover West Hill, Tipton St John and the villages up the Otter valley?
Ottery itself, West Hill, the parish hamlets of Tipton St John, Alfington, Fairmile, Metcombe and Wiggaton, the farms out towards East Hill, and Feniton on the Waterloo line. Sidmouth and Honiton have pages of their own. Where you live changes nothing, because every case reaches the Bristol lab the same way: in a tracked parcel.
Our family's Tar Barrels photographs are on one old PC that will not start. Where do we begin?
By leaving it off. A machine that stops booting usually has a failing drive, not missing photographs, and the worst thing anyone can do is reinstall Windows to see whether it helps. Send the whole tower or just the drive; one disk is £300 + VAT, nothing is charged for the diagnosis, and you see a figure in writing before anything else happens.
My sixth-former's coursework is on a USB stick that now says it needs formatting. Is the work still there?
Almost always, provided nobody clicks Format. The message means the stick's own index has broken, not that the documents have gone, and trying it in every laptop in the house gives a failing stick more chances to get worse. Take it out, post it, and the £250 + VAT band covers a USB stick or a memory card.
Is there a counter in Ottery St Mary I can bring it to?
No, and that is by design: nobody meets you, nobody collects, there is no van. Post it tracked and insured, by Royal Mail Special Delivery or a courier, or drop it in on a weekday at the lab itself: Bristol Data Recovery, Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, central Bristol, BS1 3AG. The return journey is on us.
More like this in the casebook.
From the Otter valley to a written answer, by post.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.