CR3, CR6 and CR8 · Caterham, Surrey
Data recovery, Caterham. A career's worth of client work on one laptop, backed up in the same room or nowhere.
Caterham has a CR postcode, an 01883 dialling code and no part of London in it: CR3 is the Caterham postcode district, mostly in Tandridge in Surrey, and one of four CR districts — CR3, CR5, CR6 and CR8 — that straddle the county boundary. That is the first thing to get right about the place. The second is that the sports car carrying the town's name has not been built here since 1987, and the company left Caterham altogether in 2013. What is actually here is a regional house-builder's head office — Croudace, whose land files, planning submissions, CAD and BIM models, site photography, valuations and sales records are split between that office and a set of site cabins — and around it one of the densest concentrations of sole traders on this site. Management consultants, IT contractors, surveyors, financial advisers, executive coaches and small design outfits work alone from Caterham, Warlingham, Whyteleafe, Woldingham and Chaldon, and the shape of the job never varies: a single laptop or a small office NAS, a career's worth of client work on it, and a backup, where one exists, on an external drive in the same room. Caterham School and de Stafford School add pupil, admissions and safeguarding records. The high-street retailers add till and stock data. The building and motor trades in a valley climbing from 110 to 236 metres add job photography and one accounts file. Tracked post to the lab at Guildford is how all of it arrives; the first look is not billed; and the fixed figure is on paper before any billable work.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What comes in from CR3.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A consultant's laptop that will not finish starting | Ten years of proposals, models and client correspondence | Post the disk alone and leave the rest |
| A land file drive off a site cabin, now clicking | Planning submissions and last month's progress photography on it | Unplug it at once; that noise is contact damage |
| A four-bay office NAS that has run a disk short | The share still opens, so the failure went unnoticed | Power it down before another member goes |
| A survey card the reader wants to reformat | Drone footage of ground that is now under concrete and backfill | Nothing must format it — send it in the state it came out in |
| Folder after folder renamed overnight, each with a text file left in it | Ransomware, and the external backup was plugged into the same machine | Disconnect it from the network before anything else — see the ransomware page. |
Packing it so it survives the trip.
Four questions Caterham asks.
A CR postcode — does that make this a London job?
No. CR3 is the Caterham postcode district, mostly in Tandridge in Surrey, and the 01883 dialling code rather than 020 is the quickest tell. Four CR districts straddle the boundary — CR3, CR5, CR6 and CR8 — which is where blanket claims about covering CR tend to go wrong. None of them is collected from, so the price does not shift.
One laptop, a career of client work on it. What does the first look cost?
Nothing. Examination is free, and the figure that follows goes to you in writing before you commit to anything, after which it holds. £300 + VAT is what a single hard disk comes to. Media the size of a card or a stick, £250 + VAT. Where a job runs on several disks the opening figure is £500 + VAT. Before the invoice is settled you get a list of what was read off, to check. Phones and tablets are not handled here.
Client material is on it. Is posting it sensible?
Yes. Your name is not on the docket — nor a client's — and a case reference carries the job through the lab in its place. The only areas of the disk anybody opens are the ones a recovery needs, nothing is copied elsewhere, and the working copy is wiped thirty days after the drive returns. Easy Data Recovery Ltd carries ICO registration ZC173784, and retention is covered by the privacy policy.
A bay on the office NAS has been amber since spring. What now?
Cut the power at the socket now, before the unit decides to rebuild onto what is left. Then leave it where it stands: a NAS is the one thing posted intact, case and disks together, because pulling the disks out of a NAS loses the order they were sitting in. Servers and RAID sets are the reverse — disks out, bay number written on each.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Caterham, on the same terms
Post it tracked from any CR3 counter.
From here on leave it switched off; each attempt to start it costs readable surface. When you ring, say what was open on the machine and which folders have to come back first. Examination is free, a written figure follows, and you decide before anything is billed.