CV34, CV35 · the county town · Warwick
Data recovery, Warwick. The castle draws the crowds; the county town keeps the records.
Warwick is the county town of Warwickshire, and much of the working data here is the county's own. Warwickshire County Council sits at Shire Hall, with the county courts, civic offices and the practices that serve them — solicitors, surveyors and council contractors, each keeping case files and drawings on one office server. The town's other trade is visitors. Warwick Castle, run by Merlin Entertainments, is one of its largest private employers, its ticketing and booking systems busiest in season; Warwick Racecourse holds jumps and flat meetings through the year; and the Warwickshire College Group keeps its Trident campus in the town. Around all of it, a built-up area of 36,665 people at the 2021 census holds decades of photographs on a single external drive. When a disk stops there is nowhere local to hand it in: it runs north on the M40 and M42 to the M6, and on up to the Manchester lab. Send it insured, and the first look is free.
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What tends to fail around Warwick.
No match here? Run the triage →| What you see | Why we see it here | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| A booking and ticketing server down on the busiest weekend of the season | Timed entry, memberships and the day's card takings all ran through the one box | Shut it down, write down the model, and send the disk in |
| A county-town practice NAS that has dropped a disk and will not mount | Surveys, drawings and evidence exports are held to retention rules and copied nowhere else | Take it offline; either post the whole box or pull the disks and tag each with its bay |
| A heritage trust's external drive the laptop has stopped reading | A digitised archive and years of record photography were parked on it alone | Stop plugging it in and out; mark it and post it as it stands |
| A card of wedding photographs from the castle that now reads as blank | The day cannot be run again and the card holds the only frames of it | Eject it, write nothing further to it, and post it in |
| A racing yard's laptop, taken to meetings and back, that has started clicking | Race entries, bloodstock papers and vet records are carried between yard and course | Keep it powered off from here; a clicking disk loses more with every restart |
Warwick, the practical part.
Four questions we hear from Warwick.
Do you cover all of Warwick, CV34 and CV35?
All of it — the CV34 town centre, the older streets round the castle and Shire Hall, and the CV35 addresses on the edge of town. None of that bears on the job. A drive is posted up to the Manchester lab and tracked each way; a parcel sent on a weekday is generally handled the day after it lands. The trip back to you is paid.
Our office server has died mid-week. Can the case files come back, and stay private?
Usually, yes. A dead server is everyday work here. Each disk is copied first without ever writing to it, and the documents, accounts and email are read back off that copy, never off the drive itself. Case files, surveys and council papers are held in confidence the whole way through. Switch the machine off, write down its make and model, and send the disks in — and let no one try to rebuild it in place.
A disk has dropped out of our NAS. Do we send the whole thing?
Either works for the lab. Post the whole NAS with the power off, or draw the disks out and tag every one with the bay it filled — the array is reassembled from that order here. Whichever you choose, the rule holds: add nothing to it, and let no software try to repair it first. Then box it firm and send it tracked.
Is there a counter in Warwick to hand a drive in?
No: Warwick has no counter, no van, no collection, and needs none. The drive is posted in; or, if you would sooner deliver it, the Manchester lab takes weekday hand-ins on Oxford Street — Peter House, M1 5AN. Either way the diagnosis costs nothing and the trip back to Warwick is ours.
Other pages worth a look here.
Post it from Warwick; we start the day it lands.
Keep it powered down and tell us how it happened. Nothing is agreed until the free diagnosis lands.