Stoke Poges, SL2 · posted in, never collected
Data recovery for Stoke Poges. No station in the parish, and a great many files that exist only once.
Stoke Poges is Buckinghamshire with a Slough postal address and Slough's 01753 dialling code, which is why outsiders keep putting it in Slough. It is a parish of large plots and lanes, 5,067 people at the 2021 census, with Green Belt between it and Slough to the south, Stoke Common and Burnham Beeches to the north, and the A355 running up the western side towards Beaconsfield. There is no railway station here; the nearest platforms are Slough, Burnham and Gerrards Cross. Three quite separate places sit almost side by side and are endlessly confused: St Giles', Grade I listed and Church of England, the churchyard traditionally associated with Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which he completed at Stoke Poges in 1750; the Memorial Gardens, Grade I on the register of historic parks and gardens and run by Buckinghamshire Council; and Gray's Monument and Gray's Field, which belong to the National Trust. The files that come out of all of it — photography, survey drawings, an office share, one machine in a study — arrive the same way, by tracked and insured post.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
What SL2 sends down most.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A card from a day's shoot on the estate that will not open | An event happens once, and two cards are the whole record of it | Take it out, record nothing more, send it exactly as found |
| The single office PC that will not come up after a weekend | An office-park tenant keeps a departmental share nobody ever backed up | We recover, your IT rebuilds |
| An external drive carrying a whole season of photography | One copy, carried between jobs and duplicated nowhere | The parcel this bench opens more often than any other |
| A two-bay NAS quietly down to one working disk | A mirror hides a failed member until the survivor gives out too | Nothing is rebuilt until both disks have been imaged |
| A laptop knocked over in a car park that now clicks at start-up | Equipment carried in a boot between jobs takes a battering | Power it down now; each restart costs you more |
How a Stoke Poges job runs, first call to last copy.
Four questions SL2 keeps asking.
Stoke Poges has no station. Does that make sending something awkward?
Not in the least. The nearest platforms are at Slough, Burnham and Gerrards Cross, and none of the three has anything to do with it: media travels by tracked, insured post, and an SL2 address is no different from any other. Nothing is collected from the village, from Sefton Park or from the lanes off the A355, and nothing needs to be.
A day's shoot sat on two cards and one of them will not open.
Take it out of the camera and record nothing further on it — that one decision does more than anything else you can do. What has failed is nearly always the index that tells the camera where each frame begins, while the frames themselves sit there untouched; a card that has been formatted keeps its pictures until something new goes over the top of them. Send it exactly as it is, in a small rigid box, and the first look is free.
There is a virtual machine on the NAS in our comms cupboard.
Usually recoverable, and quoted in a band of its own: virtual machine images are £800 + VAT. A NAS unit may be posted whole, which saves anyone dismantling it. Where it is a server or a RAID array instead, the disks come out and travel bare, each marked with the bay it was sitting in, and the failed member comes too.
What is the safest way to send a drive out of SL2?
Immobilise it. An anti-static bag if there is one to hand, then padding against all six faces, ideally inside the box the thing arrived in. Send it tracked and fully insured with a printed shipping form lying beside the drive, addressed to Guildford Data Recovery; the postage page takes each step in turn. Carriage on the return parcel is paid at this end.
Jobs like these, Stoke Poges and nearby.
Next door to Stoke Poges, on the same terms
One parcel out of SL2, and the work starts.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.