The cathedral city, HR1 to HR4 · Hereford
Data recovery for Hereford. A cider-maker's ferment logs sit on one office PC.
Hereford is the county town of Herefordshire and has been a city since 2000, run as a single unitary council since 1998, and it counted 53,112 residents at the 2021 census. It lives off the land and what the land makes: cider producers with fermentation and press records on a process PC, farms and a livestock market holding herd and movement data, food manufacturers with batch and traceability files, and the engineering, food and cyber-security firms out at Skylon Park in Rotherwas. Beside the cathedral — home to the Mappa Mundi and a medieval chained library, both now digitised — sit the heritage archives; around all of it are the solicitors, land agents and households with one drive between them and everything on it. None of it needs to travel with you to reach us. When a disk fails, take it out of service, pack it firm and post it tracked up the A49 and the M6; the assessment on arrival costs nothing.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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What tends to fail around Hereford.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A cider-works PC that will not boot | A season of fermentation and gravity logs was written straight to it | Shut it down, remove the disk, and post that on its own |
| A clicking backup drive from a farm office | Herd, movement and subsidy records were kept on that one disk | Unplug it now; a clicking drive loses a little more with every spin-up |
| A food plant's office PC growing slower by the week | Batch and traceability records have to be produced on demand | Image it while it still reads |
| A land agent's two-bay NAS that has stopped mounting | Measured surveys, valuations and sale-day photographs all live on it | Post the box whole, or the disks bare with each one numbered for its bay |
| A memory card of conservation photography that will not open | The manuscripts were shot once, at high resolution, and not again | Eject it, leave it as you found it, and post it in |
Hereford, the practical side.
Four questions we hear from Hereford.
Do you cover all of Hereford, HR1 to HR4 and the villages?
The whole of it — the cathedral city, the estates at Rotherwas, and the HR1 to HR4 villages around them. None of the work turns on your address: the disk travels to the lab under tracked post, is normally read the day after it is sent, and comes back at our cost.
Can you recover a season's fermentation logs from a cider-works PC?
More often than not. The records a cidery keeps — fermentation curves, gravity readings, orchard and press notes — are ordinary files on an ordinary disk, and a failed disk is a failed disk whatever was running on it. Say which pressings you need back first and we begin there. If it has taken on an odd rattle, do not power it up again; opening it is work for the bench.
How should a farm-office NAS or a small server be sent?
Whichever is easier for you. Post the unit whole and powered off, or take the disks out and label every one with the bay it sat in; the array is put back together from that here. Please don't try to reslot the disks or rebuild it first. Pad the box so nothing can shift, and send it by a tracked service.
Is there anywhere in Hereford to drop a drive in?
No — there is no Hereford counter, and we fetch nothing. Media goes to the Manchester bench: send it tracked and insured, or, if that is easier, hand it over in person — weekday hand-ins are taken at the Oxford Street lab, Peter House, M1 5AN. Whichever route you take, the diagnosis costs nothing and the leg home is ours.
Other pages worth a look here.
Send it from Hereford; the work starts the day it lands.
Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.