Shropshire's county town, SY1 to SY5 · Shrewsbury
Data recovery in Shrewsbury. The county's land agents and farm offices, each on one drive.
Shrewsbury is the county town of Shropshire, wrapped almost the whole way round by a meander of the River Severn. The council governs the county from Shirehall and is the largest public employer for miles around; Royal Shrewsbury Hospital takes the accident and emergency work for a wide rural catchment. But the recoveries that come in are mostly off the land. Land agents, auctioneers and rural surveyors keep measured surveys, valuations and sale-day photography on a single laptop; farm offices scattered across the county hold herd, movement and subsidy paperwork on one PC in an outbuilding. Add the solicitors part-way through a conveyance, the dental and GP practices, and a market town of 76,782 people at the 2021 count, most of them with irreplaceable pictures on a drive nobody ever copied. A trip is never needed. Power a failed disk down, pack it firmly and send it tracked; the diagnosis, once it lands, costs nothing.
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What tends to fail around Shrewsbury.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A land agent's laptop that no longer shows its SSD | Measured surveys, valuations and sale-day photographs were only ever kept on it | Lift the drive out and send just that, not the laptop |
| An auctioneer's backup drive that has started to click | Catalogue photographs and sale records were copied here and nowhere else | Switch it off now; the longer it runs, the more it loses |
| A solicitor's office PC that gets slower each week | Years of conveyancing and probate files sit on that one machine | Image it while it still reads |
| A two-bay NAS in a farm office that will not mount | Herd, movement and subsidy paperwork sits on that one box and nowhere besides | Send the NAS whole, or pull the disks and mark each with its bay |
| A camera card of a wedding at the abbey that will not open | Once the day is over those pictures can never be retaken | Eject the card, write nothing else to it, and post it in |
What to know before you post from Shrewsbury.
Four questions we hear from Shrewsbury.
Do you cover the whole of Shrewsbury and the SY postcodes?
All of it — the old town inside the river loop, the estates around it, and every SY1 to SY5 address out to the county villages. None of it hinges on where you are: the drive travels to the Manchester bench by post, with cover on both legs, and a weekday parcel usually reaches an engineer the following morning. The first look is free.
Can you get herd and subsidy records off a farm-office NAS?
Usually, yes. Herd, movement and BPS or SFI records sit on the same kind of disk as any other file and fail the same way. You have two choices for a NAS: box it up as one unit with the power off, or take the drives out and label each with the bay number it sat in, so the array can be put back together correctly here. Please do not try to rebuild or re-order it yourself. If a drive has begun to sound wrong, keep it powered down.
A land agent's laptop will not start. Can the surveys be recovered?
Often, yes. Measured surveys, valuations and sale-day photographs live on ordinary drives and go wrong in ordinary ways. Take the drive out if you can and post just that; where the laptop will not open, send it as a whole. Tell us which files a sale or a completion is waiting on, and those are the ones read first.
Is there somewhere in Shrewsbury to hand a drive over?
No counter operates in Shrewsbury and nothing is picked up. Everything reaches the Manchester bench by post, so use a tracked service insured for the value — or carry it in yourself, since the lab is open midweek at Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN, for anyone bringing one by hand. That first look is free, and the run home is ours.
Other pages worth a look here.
Post a drive from Shrewsbury; we begin the day it arrives.
Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.