TA21 · Tonedale to the Monument · Wellington
Wellington data recovery. No trains have stopped here since 1964; the drive goes by post.
Wellington is a small former wool town in Somerset, a civil parish of 16,678 at the 2021 census, with Junction 26 of the M5 at its edge and the Blackdown Hills to the south, where the 175 ft Wellington Monument reopened in 2021 after a £3.1m repair. Its records sit in small factories and family firms: the bed factory at Station Mills, the cloth firm founded in 1772 that now trades from Tonedale Business Park, the builders on the new estates off Nynehead Road, the farms in the vale, the solicitors and estate agents along Fore Street. What fails is ordinary: a workshop PC that has breathed foam dust for ten years and now clicks, a scanned weave archive on one external drive, a two-bay NAS with both disks gone. There is no railway station — trains last stopped here in October 1964, and the new one is funded but not built — so a drive leaves by tracked post: the A38 to Junction 26, then the M5 north to the Bristol lab, and on the day it arrives there the diagnosis is free.
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Five Wellington failures, and step one for each.
Not there? Head for the triage →| What's wrong | Why it's common locally | Step one |
|---|---|---|
| A weave archive on one external drive that has stopped showing up | Pattern books, colour standards and mill photographs were scanned once and never copied | Unplug it and stop trying other ports |
| A joiner's laptop that slid off the van seat on the Nynehead Road estates | Quotes, drawings and job photos ride round in the van on one machine | Do not power it up to see; treat it as a dropped drive |
| A farmhouse desktop with the parlour software and the cattle passports | Dairy records and field maps live on a PC under the stairs with no second copy | Leave it off; post the tower or just the drive |
| A Fore Street practice NAS showing two red lights | Solicitors and estate agents run their case software on a small box nobody checks | Power down, pull each disk, label its bay — never rebuild |
| Thirty years of the Monument, the mills and the fêtes on a shelf of externals, one now silent | A working photographer's back catalogue sits on consumer drives, each the only copy of its years | Set it aside unplugged and note which years it held |
Between the Wellington postbox and the invoice.
By Wellington.
See the whole list →Four questions that come in from TA21.
Is there a counter in Wellington, or one in Taunton I could drive to?
No — deliberately. There is no counter in Wellington or Taunton, no van, and nobody collecting; one lab, Bristol Data Recovery, does every drive, and its bench is at Castlemead, on Lower Castle Street in the city, BS1 3AG. Send it tracked and insured — Royal Mail Special Delivery from a Post Office counter, or a courier booked to the door — with the shipping form in the box; the return post is paid by us. Anyone passing through Bristol on a weekday may hand it in at Castlemead in person.
The production-office PC with our cutting patterns and spring specifications has started clicking. Can it run until Friday?
No — switch it off now, at the wall. A click is the read heads failing to find their place on the platter and trying again, and ten years of foam dust in the case has not helped; every hour it runs wears a little more of the surface that holds the patterns and the order history. Take the drive out if someone on site can, or post the whole tower switched off. If production has stopped, say so on the phone and the case runs as priority. The diagnosis costs nothing, and one drive is £300 + VAT.
Our survey photographs and grant paperwork for Tonedale are on a volunteer's home PC that no longer starts. Is that a job you take, and what does it cost?
Yes, and there is no more ordinary job on the bench. A PC that refuses to start has normally lost the drive or the Windows on it, not the files: the disk is imaged read-only the day it arrives and the photographs, spreadsheets and PDFs are read from that copy. Post the tower whole, or just the drive, switched off and padded on every side. The diagnosis costs nothing and comes back as one written figure — £300 + VAT for a single drive — agreed before any work begins, with a list of what can be recovered.
Which places around Wellington do you cover — and which Wellington is this?
Wellington in Somerset, TA21 — not the Wellington at Telford. That means the town itself, Tonedale and its business park, Bulford, the new estates off Nynehead Road, the farms in the vale and up on the Blackdowns, and Norton Fitzwarren on the Taunton side. Taunton and Tiverton have pages of their own, and the service is identical from any of them, because every case travels by post to the same Bristol bench.
More like this in the casebook.
Wellington posts a parcel north; what comes back is a free diagnosis and a price in writing.
Turn it off, say what happened, and hold any decision until the free diagnosis is back.