EX12 · Axmouth to Beer · Seaton
Data recovery, Seaton. The tram goes to Colyton; your drive goes to Bristol.
Seaton sits on Lyme Bay where the River Axe reaches the sea: a mile of shingle between Axmouth and Beer, a small harbour on the estuary, and a parish of about 7,700 at the 2021 census, mean age 54. The railway closed in 1966, and the tramway on its old trackbed now carries visitors up to Colyford and Colyton — more than 100,000 a year by its own count. The work that reaches us fits the place: the booking laptop from a caravan park, a volunteer's PC carrying years of wetland bird counts, patient scheduling on a surgery desktop, drone footage and survey point-clouds on a contractor's portable SSD, and the family photographs on an external drive that has spent ten winters in a seafront flat. Salt air and damp finish more drives here than anywhere else in the district. Seaton has no counter and nobody collects. A rigid box, Royal Mail Special Delivery or any courier with tracking, and our Bristol lab does the diagnosis for nothing when the box arrives.
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What fails in Seaton.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| The caravan park's booking laptop won't start on changeover day | A season of bookings and guest records on one machine, and no second copy | Say the bookings have stopped when you ring; it is opened the day it lands |
| The appointment book on a surgery's old desktop | GP, dental and care-home practices keep patient scheduling on desktops that were never replaced | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A volunteer's home PC holding years of wetland bird counts | Both the tramway and the wetlands have volunteer teams, and their records live on personal machines | Leave it switched off; the bare drive or the whole tower can travel |
| A contractor's portable SSD of drone footage that no longer mounts | Contractors survey the cliffs here — East Devon District Council re-armoured Seaton Hole in autumn 2025 — and the point-clouds live on pocket SSDs | Stop trying it in other ports; a vanished SSD is bench work |
| A drawing office's two-disk mirror that dropped a member months ago | Tooling drawings, magazine layouts and mail-order records are the model-railway trade's living, and a mirror is not a backup | Pull both disks, label the bays, post them bare — never rebuild |
From the Axe estuary to the bench.
Close to Seaton.
Our whole patch →What Seaton asks before it posts.
Do you cover Beer, Axmouth, Colyford and Colyton as well as Seaton?
Yes — the whole of EX12 and the Axe valley: Seaton itself, Beer with its boats winched up the beach, Axmouth, Colyford and Colyton, the wetlands up the valley and the caravan parks around the town. Sidmouth and Axminster have pages of their own, and so does Lyme Regis over the county line in Dorset. The parcel makes the same journey from all of them.
A USB stick with a term's coursework on it has stopped showing up. Is it worth sending?
Yes, and it is the cheapest job we do: a card or USB stick is £250 + VAT, with the diagnosis free before that, so you'll know what is readable before you pay anything. Stop plugging it in — each try is another chance for a failing stick to make things worse — put it in a padded envelope inside a small box, and tell us the hand-in date so the queue can be worked around it where the job allows.
The family photographs are on an external drive from about 2014, and it now clicks when it spins up. Are the pictures gone?
Usually not. A click is mechanical — heads that cannot find their place on the platter and keep trying — and the pictures are still there; what harms them is each further power-up. Unplug it, don't open it, and don't let anyone try it in another computer. It comes in as one drive — £300 + VAT — with the diagnosis free beforehand, and you name the folders — the scanned prints, the grandchildren — so those are verified before anything else.
Is there a counter in Seaton where I can hand it over?
No — and that is how it is meant to be. Nobody meets you anywhere, nothing gets collected, and no van exists. Post it tracked and insured to Bristol Data Recovery's bench: Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, BS1 3AG. Nobody minds if you are going that way and would rather hand it in at the door on a weekday. Either route ends the same way: a case number, a free diagnosis and the return post paid.
More like this in the casebook.
One tracked parcel out of Seaton; one answer back.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.