N3 to NW11, HA8, EN4 and EN5 · Barnet
Data recovery in Barnet. One practice, one machine, one copy of the file: most of what the borough posts in.
EN5 is the first thing to get right. The post town BARNET covers EN4 and EN5, and the ground beneath it lies in three separate authorities — this borough, Enfield and Hertsmere — so an EN5 address at High Barnet or Arkley can sit in Hertfordshire, and an EN4 one at Cockfosters can sit in Enfield. Meanwhile the bulk of the borough never carries an EN code at all: Hendon is NW4, Mill Hill NW7, Golders Green NW11, Finchley N3 and N12, Whetstone N20, Edgware HA8, with Colindale divided between NW9 and HA8. Three things answer to the name — the borough, the town at Chipping Barnet, and the post town — and work reaches the bench from all three. What reaches it is professional rather than industrial. There are 25,260 registered enterprises here and 86 per cent of them employ four people or fewer: a conveyancer holding thirty years of matter files, an accountancy practice whose client ledgers and payroll sit in one Sage or IRIS database, a dental surgery with patient imaging on the machine behind reception, an architect with the drawing set for a house already built, a letting agent whose photography shows stock that no longer looks like that, a family food business in Golders Green with two decades of supplier records. Barnet also has one of the largest over-65 populations of any London borough, so a good part of the domestic post is one ageing desktop carrying a lifetime of photographs. Nothing changes hands anywhere in the borough. Media travels tracked to the laboratory, the examination costs you nothing, and a written figure is agreed before anyone is billed: £300 + VAT on one hard drive, £250 + VAT on a card or stick, £400 + VAT on a DVR or NVR, and from £500 + VAT where a job holds several disks.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What the borough posts in.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A practice desktop that halts at the maker's logo | Patient imaging and the appointment book, both on that disk | Power it down at the socket and keep it down |
| A conveyancer's laptop that no longer finds its disk | Matter files and correspondence a firm is obliged to keep | Post the drive alone; the laptop is no use to us |
| A four-bay NAS behind reception, amber since June | It still shares files, so the failed disk has gone unremarked | Power it down before another member goes |
| A survey card the reader offers to format | Measured work on a building since altered and signed off | Let nothing format it — the card comes exactly as it is |
| Every file on the practice share renamed, with a note in every folder | Ransomware, and the one backup drive was mapped to that same server | Take it off the network first; the ransomware page has the rest. |
How to pack it for the post.
What Barnet asks first.
Where in Barnet can I hand the drive over?
Nowhere. There is no shop and no counter in the borough, and none anywhere else in London. Imaging benches and donor drives all sit at the intake laboratory in Guildford, which is why the disk makes the journey and you do not. Post it tracked and insured; a parcel sent from Barnet is generally opened the next working morning, and the return leg is paid at this end.
It is the one machine the practice runs on. What does a look cost?
Nothing. Looking is free. Out of it comes one figure. You get it in writing; until you say yes to it, no chargeable work is done. A card or a memory stick costs £250 + VAT. One hard drive costs £300 + VAT. Before an invoice is raised you are sent an index of the recovered files to look through, and on most jobs nothing at all is owed unless the data returns. Phones and tablets are outside what this bench takes.
There are client files on it. Who reads them?
An engineer, and no more of the disk is opened than the recovery requires. Neither your firm's name nor a client's appears on the job sheet; a case reference carries the work through instead. Nothing goes to anybody outside the laboratory, and thirty days after your drive has travelled home the working copy here is deleted. The privacy policy sets out how long each thing is kept.
The practice NAS has been running a disk down for weeks. Now what?
Switch it off at the wall before anything starts a rebuild — one disk failing, then a second failing during the rebuild, is what you are avoiding. Then leave it be. A NAS is the exception: it travels whole, with its disks left where they sit. A server or a RAID set comes apart instead, each disk numbered to its bay first, then lifted out. A job with several disks in it opens at £500 + VAT.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Barnet, on the same terms
Post it tracked from a Barnet post office.
Leave the power off and keep it off; each restart spends a little more of a disk already struggling. Tell us what the machine had been doing just before it stopped. Looking costs nothing, the price arrives in writing, and nothing chargeable happens without your say-so.