Posted in from · Sunningdale SL5
Data recovery in Sunningdale. Berkshire, SL5, and the old West Country road through the middle.
Sunningdale is a Berkshire village in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, 5,637 people at the 2021 census, a civil parish since 1894, and an SL5 address whose post town reads ASCOT. The A30 runs straight through it — the old road out to the West Country, now the village street and the village's traffic problem — with Windsor Great Park along the north side and the Surrey boundary close on the south and east. Broomhall, at the edge, was in Surrey itself until 1995. The working life here is land, houses and leisure rather than offices, and almost all of it is kept as records: golf clubs with membership, competition and greenkeeping files; hotels and caterers with booking systems, event folders and costing sheets; estate managers and small family offices with scanned deeds, inventories and valuations; yards with veterinary and breeding books; builders and architects with drawings and dated progress photographs. Most of it lives on a domestic NAS or a single external drive doing a business system's work. When one goes quiet it is posted to the Guildford laboratory, tracked and insured, and the diagnosis is free.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
Five ways an SL5 disk goes quiet.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A club office PC with the competition and handicap history on it | Membership, subscriptions and years of results, all on one machine | Booked in against a case number, never the club's name |
| A caterer's card at the end of a long wedding season | The photographs are the proof the day ran the way the invoice says | Eject it, bag it, and record nothing else on it |
| An estate office laptop with the deeds and inventories scanned onto it | Valuations, contractor records and schedules, held in one place only | Post the disk alone; the laptop can stay where it is |
| A cupboard NAS running a business it was never sold for | A mirrored pair is not a backup; the pair fails as a pair | Power it down before it starts rebuilding |
| A yard office machine with the veterinary and breeding books on it | Dated records cannot be written again after the fact | Tell us the date they are wanted by and the order follows |
How a Sunningdale case actually runs.
The questions that come in from SL5.
Is Sunninghill covered too, and does that include Wentworth?
Sunninghill is covered. It is a separate place in a different civil parish, Sunninghill and Ascot, and it has no station of its own, so people there use Sunningdale or Ascot. Wentworth is a different matter again: that estate is at Virginia Water, in the Borough of Runnymede, Surrey, GU25, and it is nobody's part of Sunningdale. Ascot has a page here of its own. Wherever the address, nothing is ever collected — it travels to Guildford by tracked, insured post.
A card was formatted by mistake after an event. Is anything left on it?
Generally, yes. Formatting rewrites the index and leaves the picture data lying where it was, and a long shoot broken across several files can often be put back together. One condition applies and it is absolute: write nothing further to that card, and do not reshoot on it. The £250 + VAT band covers cards and sticks, and the look that settles whether anything is there is free.
The club office machine will not start. What is the first thing to do?
Leave it off and ring 0800 6890668 on a weekday. Describe what it was running at the moment it stopped, and what is held on it — the membership and subscription records, competition history, the greenkeeping and irrigation log — and between us we settle what travels and how it is packed. Running recovery software against a disk that is still deteriorating is the commonest way an easy job turns into a hard one.
Is there anybody who could come out to Sunningdale and fetch it?
None. No van and no counter exist here, in Maidenhead, or anywhere else this site names. A drive or a laptop is safer and quicker as a tracked, insured parcel than in the boot of a car. It is addressed to Guildford Data Recovery on Guildford Business Park, GU2 8XH — Building 2, ground floor — and in-person drop-offs are taken there on weekdays, 9am until 5:30pm. No recovery, no fee applies to every job but three: forensic instructions, embedded recorder work, and repairs needing donor components fitted into the drive. A 50% deposit applies to those three.
Also read, if you are in Sunningdale.
Next door to Sunningdale, on the same terms
From Sunningdale it is one tracked, insured parcel.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.