EX10 · Sidford, Sidbury and Salcombe Regis · Sidmouth
Data recovery in Sidmouth. Folk Week recordings, care plans and a lifetime of photographs.
Sidmouth is a Regency seaside town at the mouth of the River Sid, held between Peak Hill and Salcombe Hill, with around 14,000 people in a parish that takes in Sidford, Sidbury and Salcombe Regis. It lives on visitors and on retirement, and its lost data follows: guest houses along the Esplanade keep the booking diary and years of accounts on one office PC; care homes hold care plans, medication charts and the rota on desktops with no second copy; and with about 30% of East Devon aged 65 or over, decades of family photographs sit on laptops that were never backed up. Folk Week has filled the first week of August since 1955 and leaves multitrack recordings on musicians' laptops, and the volunteers at the Norman Lockyer Observatory on Salcombe Hill stack long exposures on portable drives. No railway since 1967, and no counter here either. A padded box and Special Delivery take a failed drive out along the A3052 to the M5 at Junction 30 and north to the Bristol lab, and the diagnosis it gets there on the day it arrives is free.
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What fails in Sidmouth, from the Esplanade to Salcombe Hill.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A sound engineer's laptop, dead the week after Folk Week | A week of multitrack recordings from the Ham and the Bulverton on one machine | Power it off; no second attempt to boot |
| A care home's office desktop that will not start | Care plans, medication charts and the rota on one ageing PC, no second copy anywhere | We recover; your IT rebuilds |
| A portable drive of long exposures from Salcombe Hill | Volunteer astronomers stack hundreds of gigabytes of frames on pocket drives | Unplug it; no recovery software, no second try |
| A laptop bought the year a grandchild was born, now silent | Decades of photographs and scanned slides on one machine, never copied off | No repair shop, no fresh Windows — send it as it is |
| A letting agent's PC with the client ledger and the tenancy files | Small offices serving the retirement property market keep it all on one machine | Say what is due and when; a stopped office goes first |
From a Sidmouth postbox to the Bristol bench.
Next to Sidmouth.
Each town we cover →What Sidmouth asks before it posts anything.
Do you cover Sidford, Sidbury and Salcombe Regis, or only the town?
The whole parish and the villages round it: Newton Poppleford on the A3052, Feniton where the nearest trains are, and across the hills to Ottery St Mary, Honiton, Budleigh Salterton and Seaton. Everything comes by tracked post, so a box from Sidbury gets to the bench as quickly as one from the Esplanade.
Is there a counter in Sidmouth where I can hand a drive over?
No, and that is by design — one lab rather than a chain of shopfronts. Any post office counter will take it for Royal Mail Special Delivery, or you can drop it on a weekday at Bristol Data Recovery's Castlemead lab, Lower Castle Street, BS1 3AG. Nobody collects from Sidmouth, and the journey home is paid by us.
Our care home's office PC holds the care plans and medication charts. Can that really go in the post?
It can, tracked and insured, with the shipping form in the box so the case number stays with it. The disk is imaged read-only by the engineer holding the case, the files are checked against the list you give us, the copy travels back on fresh media, and a month after the drive is back — thirty days — our working copies are wiped. An office that cannot see its own rota is flagged priority from the first call.
My photographs are on a laptop bought when my grandson was born, and it will not switch on. Is it worth sending?
Yes — it is exactly the kind of job that comes in from EX10. Leave it switched off, post it untouched, and the diagnosis costs nothing when it arrives. If the pictures can be brought back it is £300 + VAT for the one drive, written down before we begin, and the return post to Sidmouth is ours.
More like this in the casebook.
Sidmouth's last train left in 1967. A postbox is all this needs.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.