On the Waterloo line · Datchet
Data recovery, Datchet. Where two counties each built half a bridge.
Datchet sits on the Thames between the Windsor Home Park and the Queen Mother Reservoir, in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, with an SL3 Slough postal address and its own South Western Railway platform for trains to Waterloo rather than anything out of Paddington. There is no Datchet Bridge: the divided crossing was dismantled under the Windsor Castle Act 1848, and Victoria Bridge and Albert Bridge, both opened in 1851, took its place. Ditton Park, the office campus off Riding Court Road, holds the corporate end of the village. The rest of it is boatyards and marine engineers on the river, the sailing club out at the reservoir, Churchmead and the primary schools, and a long tail of dental, veterinary and professional practices working off one machine in a back office. What they keep is hull and engine histories, insurance photography, race and membership data, pupil and safeguarding files, survey work that is only evidence while its dates survive. When one of those disks stops, it goes to the Guildford intake laboratory as a tracked, insured parcel, the diagnosis costs nothing, and the quote that follows is written once.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five things that go wrong in Datchet.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A workstation from a Ditton Park office that posts and stops | A campus of Class A offices where the working copy sits on a local disk | Leave it switched off and pull the disk; the tower stays where it is |
| A boatyard laptop holding hull and engine histories | Survey photography proves a boat's condition on a date, and dates do not repeat | Stop using it and tell us the last thing it did |
| The clubhouse machine at the reservoir, with the race and membership data | One computer in one clubhouse, carrying the safeguarding file as well | Shut it down before anybody runs a repair utility on it |
| A two-disk NAS from a village dental or veterinary practice | Clinical records on a small unit nobody has tested a restore from | Power it off at the front button; a NAS may be posted whole |
| A drive out of a property that had taken water | Moisture readings, floor levels and dated photography sit behind a claim | No drying and no power: bag it, and send it in that state |
What happens to a Datchet drive.
Questions that come in from SL3.
Datchet has a Slough postal address. Where does the parcel go?
To Guildford. The SL3 on your envelope is a post town and nothing more — Datchet is in Berkshire, in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead — and none of that decides where media is read. The label wants Guildford Data Recovery on it, at Guildford Business Park, GU2 8XH, Building 2 on the ground floor. Send it tracked and insured; the carriage back is ours.
A card from a race day at Datchet Water was formatted. Is anything left?
Usually, yes. Formatting clears the index rather than the pictures, so the frames normally sit exactly where they were written until something else lands on top of them. One rule settles it: take the card out, put it somewhere safe and write nothing more to it — not a test shot, not a repair utility.
The server in a Ditton Park office has dropped two disks. What travels?
Ring the laboratory first and say what the array is and what the set was busy with at the point it stopped. A server or a RAID has to come apart, the disks labelled in bay order; a NAS unit, or an external drive in its own enclosure, can be posted whole. Nothing is imaged until you have a written price in front of you.
Will anyone come and collect it from Datchet?
No. Nobody collects, here or anywhere: this site runs no counter, no van and no driver, in Datchet or in Maidenhead. Tracked, insured post is both faster and a great deal duller, which is what you want. Should the item be heavy or awkward, ring 0800 6890668 on a weekday — the office is open 9am to 5:30pm — and we will settle how it is packed and sent.
More of the jobs we close near Datchet.
Next door to Datchet, on the same terms
Every Datchet case starts with a phone call and a parcel.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.