The Potteries · Stoke-on-Trent
Data recovery in Stoke-on-Trent. The glaze recipes sit on one disk.
Stoke-on-Trent is one city built from six towns — Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton — joined in 1910, with Hanley as the centre and a population of 258,369. It has held city status since 1925, and the Potteries still set its character: Wedgwood at Barlaston, Emma Bridgewater in Hanley, Steelite at Middleport, Portmeirion and Royal Doulton. Around them are bet365 at Etruria, the University of Staffordshire at Shelton, and Royal Stoke, one of the largest hospitals in the country. What tends to fail is ordinary: a design office keeping its glaze recipes, mould files and firing logs on a single machine; a decal studio with decades of artwork on one NAS; a surgery or a solicitor whose whole system will not open. A drive posted from any ST postcode goes north on the M6 to the lab in Manchester, imaged read-only before a thing is changed. What it costs to look is nothing.
Tell an engineer what it is doing
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What breaks across the six towns.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A design PC that will not start, with the glazes on it | One office machine holds the mould files, recipes and firing logs, and nothing is copied off | Leave it switched off; do not reinstall or run repair tools |
| A decal studio's NAS gone read-only | Decades of transfer artwork and colour separations live on the box alone | Post it whole, or the loose disks each bay-marked; begin no rebuild |
| A works server still running after a disk light turned red | Production and QA records sit on a small array that carries on when one disk drops | Shut it down before another goes |
| A conveyancer's laptop stuck on a BitLocker key box | The key was set years ago and the property and probate files sit behind it | Track down the key, or the account it is tied to |
| A shared drive whose files will no longer open | An office across the six towns is as easy a mark as any bigger name | Pull it off the network before anything else; the ransomware page has the steps |
Before a drive leaves the six towns.
Questions from across the six towns.
Do you cover all six towns, not just Hanley?
Yes — all of it, from Tunstall down to Longton, and every ST postcode the city uses. Because it all moves by tracked courier, a Longton drive reaches us as fast as one from the middle of Hanley, and anything sent midweek is normally with us inside a day.
Our design PC won't boot. Can the mould and glaze files come back?
Usually. Mould and model files, glaze recipes, firing logs and product shots sit on ordinary drives and fail in ordinary ways — a worn disk, a dropped laptop, a bad update. Tell us which jobs are urgent and that list is worked first. Keep the machine switched off until it is booked in.
Do you need the whole NAS, or just the disks?
Either works. Send the unit whole, or take the disks out and label each with its bay number; both let the set be rebuilt from images. Put whichever disk failed first in as well, and do not let the box run a rebuild before it comes out to us.
Is there a counter in Stoke-on-Trent I can use?
No — there is no counter anywhere across the city, and that is deliberate: the kit sits in one place. Post the drive to the Manchester lab up the M6, or call in with it on a weekday. Looking costs nothing, and the trip back to Stoke-on-Trent is on us.
Other pages worth a look here.
Post it from Stoke-on-Trent, and 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.