TQ9, Dartington and the head of the Dart · Totnes
Totnes data recovery. The Dart's boats come up as far as here; a failed drive goes on to Bristol by post.
Totnes is a river town before it is anything else: the boats up from Dartmouth come no further than here, and the town climbs from the bridge up Fore Street to the Norman castle on the hilltop. South Hams District Council runs its district from Follaton House on the edge of town, and the parish counted 8,241 people at the 2021 census, but most of the work here is small. Counsellors and therapists with years of client notes on one laptop; illustrators and film-makers with a studio on a MacBook and a desktop drive; wholefood shops and market traders with the till and the supplier ledger on a single machine; co-operatives whose member lists live on a volunteer's home PC; the museum's and the heritage railway's photographs, scanned once. None of it is mended in Totnes. A failed drive goes tracked and insured — Special Delivery from a Post Office, or a courier from your door — to BS1 3AG, Castlemead, Lower Castle Street, Bristol, and the diagnosis it gets there is free.
Talk it over with an engineer
0800 6890668
Five ways Totnes loses its files.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A counsellor's laptop that will not start | Therapists and complementary practitioners here keep years of client notes on one machine | Switch it off and leave it off; nothing on it is read beyond the recovery |
| A studio's desktop drive gone silent mid-commission | Illustrators, publishers and film-makers work from a MacBook and one external, and the external is the archive | Unplug it; do not try it in another Mac |
| A wholefood shop's till PC that froze on market day | The organic and vegan shops and the market stalls keep till, supplier ledger and Shopify export on a single machine | No reinstalling anything; the drive or the whole base unit travels |
| A co-operative's member list on a volunteer's home PC | Totnes's charities, co-ops and community-energy groups run from somebody's kitchen-table computer | Power it down and tell us which folders the group needs first |
| A boatyard laptop at Baltic Wharf that took a knock | Survey photographs and the season's bookings ride on portable kit at the head of navigation | A knock is mechanical: keep the power off and let it travel as it is |
A Totnes case, from parcel to invoice.
Next to Totnes.
Each town we cover →What Totnes asks before posting anything.
Do you cover Dartington, Bridgetown and the villages along the Dart?
Yes. All of TQ9 — Totnes, Dartington and Bridgetown — plus Stoke Gabriel and the river villages, Buckfastleigh up the A38, and out to Ashburton, Dartmouth, Paignton and Newton Abbot, which have pages of their own. Every one of them reaches the Bristol lab the same way, by tracked post, so the village you live in never changes the service.
Is there a counter in Totnes where I can hand the drive over?
No, and on purpose: the work happens in one properly equipped lab in Bristol, not at a desk in every town. From Totnes it goes as Royal Mail Special Delivery over the counter of your nearest Post Office branch, or a tracked courier is booked to collect it from your door. Should a weekday find you in Bristol, drop-offs in person are welcome at Bristol Data Recovery's lab — BS1 3AG, Castlemead, Lower Castle Street.
I'm a counsellor and the laptop holds years of client notes. Who sees them?
The engineer on the case, and only as far as checking the recovery needs. On arrival the drive gets a case number and is imaged read-only before anyone attempts anything else, and the work is done from that image. You get a list of what came back to check against your own records, the copies we worked from are wiped once the laptop has been home for thirty days, and it travels both ways tracked and insured.
The family photographs are on an old iMac that will not start. Does the disk have to come out?
Not unless you want it to. One drive is one drive, bare or still in its iMac — the £300 + VAT band either way — so pack the whole computer if nobody local will open it. What matters more is to stop restarting it: a ten-year-old spinning disk loses a little more at every attempt, and imaging it once, read-only, is the safe route to the pictures.
More like this in the casebook.
One tracked parcel out of Totnes; one written answer back.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.