The county town, ST16 to ST21 · Stafford
Data recovery for Stafford. A hundred years of power engineering, all of it on file.
Stafford is the county town of Staffordshire and the seat of both the county council and the county's police, so a good deal of the work here is paperwork held on one office server at a time. The old centre sits on a near-island in a loop of the River Sow, with the Penk close by; the M6 passes at junctions 13 and 14, and the West Coast Main Line stops in the middle of town. Its other trade is heavier — the transformer and power-grid works that ran as English Electric, then GEC, then Alstom, and since 2015 General Electric, a century of test-cell logs and CAD assemblies on engineers' machines. Around all that are the land agents and surveyors, the solicitors mid-conveyance, the farm offices in the Sow and Penk valleys, and 71,673 townspeople at the 2021 census with a drawer of photographs on one external drive. When a disk stops here, take it out of use, box it firm and send it by tracked post; the assessment on arrival is free.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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What fails around Stafford.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| An engineer's workstation at the power-grid works that will not start | Test-cell logs, CAD assemblies and per-unit build records live on that one machine | Power it down, note the model, and post the disk |
| A council contractor's external drive the PC has stopped reading | Survey files, drawings and evidence exports were kept nowhere else | Do not keep replugging it; label it and send it as it is |
| A high-street solicitor's server stalled part-way through a conveyance | Conveyancing files and completion papers must be kept under retention rules | Leave it off, list the files holding up completion, and send it |
| A farm-office NAS out in the Penk valley that no longer mounts | Herd, field and movement records sit on that box and nowhere else | Send the whole unit, or the bare disks each labelled by its bay |
| A memory card of measured-survey photographs that will not open | The site has moved on and the shots cannot be taken again | Eject it, add nothing more to it, and send it as it is |
Stafford, the practical side.
What Stafford asks us.
Do you cover the whole of Stafford, ST16 to ST21?
All of it — the county-town centre, the estates out along the Sow and the Penk, and every ST16 to ST21 address. None of this turns on where you are: a drive goes to the lab by tracked post, comes back the same way, and most parcels are on the bench the day after they are sent. The leg home is ours.
Can you get CAD and test-cell data off a dead engineering workstation?
Usually, yes. Test-cell logs, CAD assemblies and per-unit build records live on the same kinds of disk as anything else and go wrong in the same ways, whatever the workstation cost. Tell us which jobs are holding up the line and those get read first. If the disk has begun to make an unfamiliar noise, keep it switched off and let the bench open it.
How should a NAS or a small server be sent?
Whichever is easier. Either the whole unit comes in powered off, or the disks travel bare with the bay each came from written on it — the array is reassembled in that order at the bench. Do not reslot the disks or start a rebuild before it ships. Pack it so nothing shifts, and send it tracked.
Is there anywhere in Stafford to drop a drive off?
Stafford has no counter and we send no courier to collect. A drive makes its way to the Manchester lab up the M6; post it under a tracked, insured service, or, if it is easier to hand over yourself, the bench takes weekday deliveries at Peter House, Oxford Street, M1 5AN. Nothing is charged for the look, and we pay for the return.
Other pages worth a look here.
Send a drive from Stafford; we open it the day it lands.
Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.