Where we work · Watlington, OX49
Data recovery, Watlington. Under the escarpment, where a lost survey waits a year to be redone.
Watlington sits at the foot of the Chilterns' western escarpment, beneath Watlington Hill and the White Mark — the chalk triangle laid out to give the church a spire when you look up at it from the town. It is reputedly England's smallest town, and it has the furniture of one: a seventeenth-century town hall put up by Thomas Stonor where three routes meet, a centre of independent shops and an inn or two, Icknield Community College on Love Lane, and South Oxfordshire District Council and Oxfordshire County Council above it. No passenger train has called since 1957; the way in is the B4009 from the M40 at Lewknor. What that leaves is a working landscape and a great many businesses of one — farm offices, land agents, ecologists, holiday lets, a school, volunteers with a scanner — and nearly all of it lives on one machine each. Nobody collects anything in this town. You post it, tracked and insured, and pay nothing for the diagnosis.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
What OX49 sends us, and why.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A farm-office PC that has stopped being seen at all | Field maps, yield data, soil sampling and spray records, all of them required | Cut the power at once and do not let it keep trying |
| An ecologist's external holding a season's protected-species work | A survey missed in its season is not repeated until the next one | Write nothing further to it and post the drive on its own |
| A GIS project drive stuffed with drone and survey imagery | Land agents keep years of it in one folder tree on one disk | Take an image while it reads |
| The four-bay NAS that runs a one-person consultancy | A box like that quietly turns into the whole business | Shut it down and send it whole; a server or RAID goes as bare disks |
| A yard recorder holding the only footage an insurer will take | Loops overwrite on a fixed number of days and nobody stops that clock | Power it off first, then post the recorder's own disk |
What happens between the parcel and the copy back.
Four things Watlington asks.
Can a Watlington practice send us live client work?
Yes, and the handling assumes exactly that. Your device carries a case number through the laboratory instead of a client's name, engineers open no more of it than the recovery actually forces them to, and working copies are destroyed once the drive is back with you. Land agents, surveyors and accountants out here send files in most weeks. The privacy policy sets out the detail and is yours to keep on the file.
How long does a job from OX49 usually take?
Posted on a weekday afternoon, a parcel is normally on the bench next morning and the written quote follows it. Say yes to it and a logical fault is generally done within two working days. Mechanical work, and any set of more than one disk, takes longer, and that is said plainly before you commit to anything.
What comes back with the drive for our own file?
All of it, as standard and never as an add-on: the fixed quote in writing, a checked list of what was recovered for you to look over before any money moves, and a VAT invoice.
There is no station here. Does that make this harder?
Not in the slightest — none of this depends on a railway or a van. The branch closed to passengers in 1957 and the road in is the B4009 down to the M40 at Lewknor, but your drive takes neither: it goes tracked and insured through the post to the Guildford laboratory, and the carriage home is paid. The number is 0800 6890668, answered 9am to 5:30pm on weekdays.
The rest of what Watlington sends us.
Next door to Watlington, on the same terms
Post it from OX49; the rest of it is ours to do.
Nothing is decided until the free diagnosis is in: leave the device off, and tell us what happened to it.