WS13, WS14 · the three-spired city · Lichfield
Data recovery in Lichfield. Three spires over a city of small firms, each on one server.
Lichfield is a cathedral city of 34,738 in Staffordshire, the wider district home to about 106,400. Its cathedral is the only medieval one in England to carry three spires, begun in 1195, and Samuel Johnson, who wrote the first great English dictionary, was born in the city in 1709. The data we see, though, is plain working data. Solicitors, accountants and surveyors across the WS13 and WS14 catchment keep a practice on one server and a single backup drive. The cathedral, the museums and the heritage bodies hold digitised archives and conservation records. Out at Fradley Park, one of the county's largest distribution sites, warehouse systems and site CCTV sit on lone machines. And across the district, years of family photographs live on one ageing external drive. When one stops, it travels the M6 to the Manchester bench; send it insured, and the diagnosis costs nothing.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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What breaks in Lichfield.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A cathedral archive drive that now reads as empty | Digitised records and conservation photographs, scanned once and kept in one place | Unplug it, leave it alone, and let the lab image it first |
| A warehouse server gone quiet at a Fradley Park unit | Stock, picking and dispatch all run through it, backed up nowhere | Keep it powered down until it has been imaged |
| An accountant's external drive the PC will not read at year-end | Client accounts and tax files were parked on it and nowhere else | Stop unplugging and replugging it; label it and send it on |
| A home-office NAS in the district that has stopped mounting | More people here work from home than not, and that box is the only backup | Switch it off at the mains, then post the whole box, or the disks pulled out and each labelled with its bay |
| A card of cathedral wedding photographs that will not open | The day is over and the card holds the only copy | Pull the card, leave it exactly as it stopped, and post it in |
Lichfield, the practical detail.
What Lichfield tends to ask.
Do Fradley, Burntwood and the villages round Lichfield count?
They do. Lichfield is in Staffordshire, not Birmingham, but none of that matters to the job. Anything from WS13, WS14 or the villages around goes by tracked post to the Manchester lab, usually reaching an engineer the morning after you send it. We pay the leg home.
A firm's server here will not boot. Can the files come back?
Usually, yes. A dead server is routine work: the disks are copied read-only first, then the files, ledgers and mailboxes are pulled from that copy, never from the original. Switch the machine off, jot down the make and model, and post the disks. Do not let anyone rebuild the array in place.
A NAS at a Fradley unit has dropped a disk. Send the whole box?
Either suits our lab. Post the NAS as a whole unit, or lift the disks out and tag each one with its bay number before sending — we rebuild it from that here. The rule either way is to stop writing to it and let nothing try to repair it. Power down, pack tight, post it.
Is there a counter in Lichfield to hand a drive in?
No. We keep no counter, van or office in Lichfield; none is needed. Post the drive to the lab, or, should you prefer to deliver it, the Manchester premises welcome midweek callers there — Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN. The diagnosis is free and the trip back to Lichfield is ours.
Other pages worth a look here.
A Lichfield drive is one parcel from the bench.
Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.