NW10 and HA9 · Brent
Data recovery, Brent. A food unit's traceability file, due on demand, on one small server in a locked office.
Park Royal is why this borough is unlike its neighbours. The GLA's development corporation calls it the largest area of strategic industrial land in London and puts roughly 1,700 businesses and 43,100 jobs on it, in food manufacturing, logistics, film and prop hire and vehicle repair — though the borough boundary runs straight through it, so an NW10 address there can be either Brent or Ealing. What those firms keep has to be producible on demand. A food factory holds HACCP and traceability files, batch and lot numbers, chilled-chain temperature logs, supplier certificates and allergen matrices, usually on one small server or a NAS in a locked office. A prop or lighting hire house holds an asset register with a photograph of every item on it, along with hire contracts and PAT-test records; without that you cannot show what you own or that it is safe to hire out. A freight forwarder holds consignment notes and customs entries for goods long since delivered. pladis is still manufacturing on Waxlow Road in Harlesden, and announced £68m for UK manufacturing in July 2025. Round Wembley the trade is events and hospitality: staff rosters and pass lists for a night that happens once. And Kilburn High Road, Harlesden High Street and Ealing Road in Alperton are independent traders almost end to end, most of them working off one back-office PC. Nothing is collected from Brent. The media goes by post, looking at it costs nothing, and one written figure precedes any chargeable work: cards and sticks at £250 + VAT, a single drive at £300 + VAT, a recorder at £400 + VAT, and £500 + VAT and upwards once a job takes in a second disk.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five faults that keep arriving from NW10 and HA9.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A technical office NAS that will not mount | Batch records, temperature logs and the allergen matrix | Power down first, write the bay number on each disk, send them bare |
| The laptop a technical manager carries everywhere | Specifications and supplier certificates, copied nowhere | Send the disk; the machine stays with your IT |
| A hire company's external, in and out of vans | The asset register, with a photograph of every item | The most common job on this bench; stop using it |
| A mirrored pair in a Park Royal unit, down to one disk | Nobody has opened the box since the week it went in | Each member is imaged; the rebuild waits until after |
| Knocked off a desk, and clicking since | Kit that shuttles between a unit and a van takes more knocks than you think | Keep it unpowered; every restart takes more off the disk |
Getting it here, and what it costs.
The four questions asked most.
Which parts of Brent does this cover?
All of it, on one set of terms: NW2, NW6, NW9 and NW10, HA0 and HA9, and the HA3 fringe at Kenton — Wembley, Willesden, Kilburn, Harlesden, Neasden, Kingsbury and Alperton. Because nothing is ever collected, a unit in Park Royal and a shop on Ealing Road do exactly the same thing: send the media tracked, pay nothing for the examination, and pay nothing for its journey home.
The NAS in the technical office has stopped mid-rebuild.
Take the power off it now. A rebuild finishes only by reading every sector of every disk still turning, and on a box that has been logging temperatures and batch records for years that steady demand is what finds the next weak member; broken off part way, you end up further back than the fault itself had put you. So: cut the power, write on each disk the bay it came out of, and send the drives bare. A NAS is the exception and travels assembled. Any job with a second disk in it sits in the £500 + VAT band.
An auditor may want to see how this was handled. What comes back?
A read-only image is made from the media you send, and everything after that happens against the image rather than the original, which returns in the condition it reached us in. One price is settled on paper before any of it begins. What you finish with is the files on new media, plus an itemised account of which read whole and which did not — the sort of record that stands up to being asked about later.
What is the right way to box a drive up?
A drive is damaged in transit by being able to move, so deal with that first. Anti-static bag where you have one. Firm padding against all six faces, or else the packaging the drive originally came in. A tracked service. Insure the parcel against the files, not against what the hardware cost, and slide a printed shipping form in with it. The posting page has the rest; the leg home is ours.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Brent, on the same terms
Box it properly in Wembley — looking is free.
Leave it switched off at the wall. The useful detail is what the machine had been asked to do before it stopped — a shift of temperature logging, an export, an overnight copy that never ran. Looking costs nothing, and the written figure that follows waits on your agreement.