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BHDR / Areas and towns / Stratford-upon-Avon

CV37, on the River Avon · Stratford-upon-Avon

Data recovery in Stratford-upon-Avon. The RSC, the Birthplace Trust and a town of hotels, all on disk.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a market town of 30,495 people at the 2021 census, on the River Avon in the south of Warwickshire, and its modern economy rests on the one fact the world knows it for: William Shakespeare was born here in 1564. Around that grew tourism and hospitality — the Royal Shakespeare Company, resident at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Swan and The Other Place, and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which keeps Shakespeare's Birthplace and Anne Hathaway's Cottage. It is one of England's leading tourist towns, and behind the hotels, restaurants and guest houses sits a great deal of data: box-office and membership systems, property-management and booking databases, reservation histories and the CCTV recorder alongside. When one of those fails — a theatre server mid-run, a hotel system in high season, a photographer's card after a shoot — there is no counter to call at in Stratford. The drive is posted north to the Manchester lab, tracked both ways, and the first look is free.

Send it tracked · the return is ours Free diagnosis when it arrives The price in writing is final

Tell an engineer what it is doing
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What tends to fail in Stratford-upon-Avon.

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What you seeWhy we see it hereWhat to do
A box-office server at a theatre that will not bootTicketing, membership and the production archive live on it, mid-runLeave it switched off and tell us which show it holds up
A hotel's booking box that has stopped mountingReservations, guest records and takings are kept nowhere elsePull it off the mains; ship the whole box, or its disks drawn out and bay-tagged
A guest house's one office PC, dead over the weekendThe accounts, the bookings diary and years of email ran on itWe recover the data; the machine itself is your IT's job
An external drive of digitised heritage images that has begun to clickScanned collections and survey photography were archived only hereStop plugging it in; label it and post it as it is
A wedding photographer's card that no longer opensThe riverside and the churches cannot be shot a second timeEject it, copy nothing more onto it, and send it as it is
Sending it by post: post it to the intake lab fully insured and tracked, with the shipping form tucked in beside the drive; the journey home is on us. Packing is set out step by step on the posting page.

How a job runs from Stratford-upon-Avon.

The road north is the A46 and M6There is no collection and no counter in the town. A Stratford-upon-Avon parcel runs up the A46 and the M40, then joins the M6 north to the intake lab in Manchester, where recoveries are worked. Post it on a weekday, tracked and next-day, and it is generally on the bench the next morning. The return to you is paid.
Packing is what protects itMore harm reaches a failed drive after the fact than on the bench, and posting is the riskiest part. Use a carton that stays rigid, cushion every face, and leave no slack for movement. Where a drive has been damp, dusty or hot, tell us at the booking rather than after the diagnosis — and never dry it yourself, which is a controlled-conditions job at the lab. The posting page lists the method and the shipping form.
What you send stays privateWhat a Stratford-upon-Avon drive carries — ticketing and guest records, membership lists, case files, images — stays confidential from the hour the parcel is unpacked. Show us the folders that count and the returned files are checked against those alone. Each job runs to a case number from arrival, and the working copies are cleared thirty days after it returns to you.
No surcharge for a CV37 addressA CV37 address is quoted like any other. The look on arrival is free, and the one set figure that follows is given to you in writing and agreed before a single chargeable step; on the majority of jobs a nil recovery carries no charge, and the return carriage sits inside that figure. For the numbers: a memory card or USB stick runs to £250 + VAT. One internal disk, spinning or solid-state, is £300 + VAT. A recorder taken from a CCTV or DVR system is £400 + VAT. Anything built on a second disk — a server, a NAS, a RAID array — begins at £500 + VAT.

Four things Stratford-upon-Avon asks us.

Do you cover all of Stratford-upon-Avon and CV37?

All of CV37 — the town centre along the river, the streets around the theatres and Shakespeare's Birthplace, and the villages out across the district. Where you sit changes nothing: the drive is sent to the lab and returned by tracked post, and most parcels are handled the day after they arrive. We cover the leg home.

Our hotel's booking system is on a server that has failed in high season. Can the reservations be recovered?

Usually, yes. A property-management or booking database sits on the same kind of disk as anything else and fails in the same ways, whatever the software behind it. Each disk is copied read-only and we work only on that copy, so the original goes back as it came. Tell us which dates and guest records matter and those are read first; a fixed price in writing comes before any chargeable step.

A disk in our NAS has failed and it has started to rebuild. Should we let it finish?

No — power it down. A rebuild must read every surviving disk from end to end, exactly the strain a failing drive gives out under, so a rebuild that stalls can leave the set in worse shape than the original fault left it. Send the enclosure entire, or pull the disks and note which bay held each. Do not attempt to reslot or resync it.

Is there anywhere in Stratford-upon-Avon to hand a drive in?

Stratford-upon-Avon has no counter and nothing is collected. The drive travels to the Manchester lab, which is open for weekday drop-offs at Peter House, Oxford Street (M1 5AN); most people simply post it, insured for its value and tracked. The look on arrival is free, and the parcel back to you is ours.

Post one drive from Stratford-upon-Avon; we begin the day it lands.

Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.

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