North bank, Berkshire · Eton
Data recovery in Eton. In Buckinghamshire until 1974, in Berkshire ever since.
Eton is one very long street on the north bank of the Thames, with its own town council — the only one in the Royal Borough — a Windsor SL4 postal address, and a county that changed in 1974. The High Street runs on small businesses: cafés and pubs, outfitters, galleries, print rooms and antique dealers whose provenance photography is worth a great deal more than the laptop holding it. Eton College, founded in 1440, is the largest employer in the town by a wide margin, with around 1,218 staff in the year to August 2024, and it keeps a long tail of caterers, groundskeepers, instrument repairers and outfitters in work, each of them running off one small server in a back room. Along the water the boatyards, rowing clubs and coaches hold timing data and coaching video; Eton Wick, the separate village in the same parish, adds home offices. When a disk stops, it goes to the Guildford intake laboratory by tracked, insured post, and nothing is charged for looking at it.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five faults that come out of Eton.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A dealer's laptop with the provenance photography on it | On the High Street the paperwork proving what a piece is outlives the machine | Leave it powered down and note when it last worked properly |
| A till or EPOS box that stays dark after a power cut | Small shops reconcile the card takings on the same machine that runs the counter | Do not reinstall; an untouched disk images far better |
| A season of coaching video on one external drive | Clubs and coaches on the river keep timing data and footage in a single place | An external in its own enclosure may be posted whole |
| A surveyor's tablet of condition photography for a listed building | Consent work on Eton's listed street is dated evidence tied to one application | Ring before it travels and we will agree how it is packed |
| A back-office server with years of order history on it | Caterers, groundskeepers and outfitters here run the whole business off one box | A server travels as bare disks, labelled in bay order |
How an Eton case is handled.
What Eton asks before posting.
Eton posts as Windsor. Does the drive go to Windsor?
It does not. SL4 is a post town; Eton is a town in its own right, with its own council, inside the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. Media goes to one place only, the intake laboratory at Guildford Business Park, GU2 8XH, and the label has to read Guildford Data Recovery. Put any other name on it and the courier may well be turned away at the door.
A dealer's card of provenance photographs was formatted. Anything left?
Normally. Formatting rewrites the index and leaves the images sitting where they were originally written, and a set broken across several files can usually be put back together again. There is one condition, and it is absolute: nothing further is written to that card, including by any software offering to fix it.
The back-office server at a High Street business has stopped. What do we send?
Ring first and describe it. A server or a RAID array has to be taken down to its disks, each labelled in bay order so the set can be put back at the bench; a NAS unit goes whole, as does an external drive left in its own enclosure. Whatever turns up is diagnosed at no charge before a price is quoted.
Can somebody collect from the High Street?
No. This site keeps no counter, no van and no collection round, in Eton or anywhere else. Windsor Bridge has carried no motor traffic since 1970 in any case, so a tracked, insured parcel is the sensible way out of the town. Ring 0800 6890668 in office hours, weekdays, and an engineer will agree the packing with you.
Jobs like these, Eton and nearby.
Next door to Eton, on the same terms
Send it from Eton and the first look costs nothing.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.