WC1, NW1, NW3, W1T and EC1N · Camden
Data recovery in Camden. A bench PC with the only copy of a commission model.
Camden has more documentary material per square mile than anywhere else in London, held in institutions that are a great deal older than their data systems. WC1 is essentially the southern half of the borough. It includes UCL, Birkbeck and SOAS located in Bloomsbury, where there are many research datasets and instrument output on each researcher’s laptop or portable drive. The British Museum is a street away. Additionally, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital has 389 beds and does not have an emergency department. Also in close proximity is the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery on Queen Square. The British Library is located on the Euston Road, and its own published account is the most valuable document any business within Camden could read. On 28 October 2023, the Rhysida group took approximately 600GB of data from the British Library, and the library did not restore its main catalogue until 15 January 2024 (both dates are in the Library's own Learning Lessons report). As reported by the Financial Times in January 2024, the rebuild was put at around £6 to 7 million, about 40 per cent of the Library's reserves. Although the library's physical collections were never in question and remain intact, the systems that catalogued them were unavailable for a year. There are two postcode facts that allow you to tell a local from a visitor. W1T is the only W1 district that is part of Camden, which splits the Fitzrovia advertising, architecture and design trade along Cleveland Street. In addition, EC1N (Hatton Garden) is also part of Camden, and there a workshop's CAD models, the STL files sent for casting and the photographs of the stones are what let a piece be remade or repaired years after its initial creation. The same exposure, on smaller kit, is present north of the Euston Road, among the market traders, the offices of King's Cross in N1C and the practices found in Camden Town. Nothing is collected from any part of Camden. To get a quote first, please contact us via telephone or use the online quote form on our website. Once your quote is received, please post your items tracked and insured or bring them to our Guildford intake lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, without needing an appointment. We will examine your media free of charge and provide you with a written price before we proceed with extracting data from your media: £300 + VAT for a single hard disk, £500 + VAT upwards where several disks belong together, and £250 + VAT for a card or memory stick.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five jobs Camden puts on the bench.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| An unstartable bench PC in Hatton Garden. | The CAD model and commission record for one item. | Leave it turned off, get a price first, then send us the hard disk. |
| A tower in a Bloomsbury department that is located under a desk. | This is research data, instrument readings and a current thesis. | Turn it off; obtain a price before sending us the hard drive alone. |
| A camera memory card that the reader now shows as empty. | A studio's stone photography, pulled from the middle of a write operation. | Don't format anything; don't access anything further on this device; get a price first, then post it to us as found. |
| A practice server which currently does not mount its shared volume. | Case files and chambers records from the barristers at Gray's Inn. | Stop restarting it. Ring us first. |
| A family's external drive that is now making a clicking noise. | All photographs in a household. There is no other backup location for these photos. | Don’t turn it on again. Clicking is physical harm occurring to your device. |
Four things worth settling before it is posted.
What Camden asks first.
Is Hatton Garden in Camden, or does the EC1 make it the City?
Camden. EC1N is Camden for approximately all of its length, regardless of what the letters say, and the same applies in the opposite direction in Fitzrovia, where W1T is Camden and W1W adjacent to it is Westminster, and both councils formally agreed upon this separation in 2014. The borough covers an area from Holborn, up through Bloomsbury, King's Cross and Camden Town to Hampstead and Highgate, and nothing is collected from any part of it.
The bench PC holding the CAD models has stopped.
You need to power your equipment down and keep it powered down. On a jeweller's bench, these things tend to live in one place and one place only: the Rhino or Matrix model, the STL file produced for casting, the photos of the stones, and the commission record detailing sizing and specifications. Between them, these pieces of information provide enough detail to let someone repair or remake the item ten years after it has been made. Before sending us anything, get a quote (either by telephone or using our form), then undo the screws, leave the machine where it stands, and send us the hard disk alone via tracked, insured post or drop it off personally at our Guildford intake lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment is necessary). The cost is £300 + VAT, which we will send to you in writing prior to carrying out any chargeable work.
The research data sits on a laptop nobody ever backed up.
This is the most frequent situation in WC1 by far: data sets, instrument outputs and an academic’s analysis for their dissertation, whether on an individual’s computer or on a portable hard drive which travels from building to building. In either eventuality, we image the drive read-only and every attempt at recovery takes place on that copy rather than your original, so what you post to us will arrive home as you last saw it. If you give us a date when you require the recovered data, we will mark the job accordingly.
Is there anywhere in Camden to leave a drive?
No such place exists in Camden, and London has no public counter where individuals may take their equipment either. Instead, jobs are booked into our Guildford intake lab, which houses the imaging rigs along with a shelf full of spare donor drives. Therefore, unless you want to travel with your equipment, the media will generally travel while you stay put. First obtain a quotation (over the telephone or through our form); then send your drive via tracked, insured post from any counter within the borough and we expect to receive it on the next working day, or otherwise drop it off at our Guildford intake lab yourself, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment required). Looking is free of charge and the return postage is borne by us.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Camden, on the same terms
Pack it in Camden; the parcel does the rest of the journey.
Do not turn it back on. The best thing you can tell us is what your equipment was doing immediately before it failed. So, have that ready. We offer a free examination of your equipment. Once we have completed this examination, one price will come back to you in writing, and nothing chargeable will be carried out until you have read it and said yes.