DA11, DA12 and DA13 · Gravesend and Northfleet
Gravesend data recovery. A pilot's passage plan is a record, not a memory, and it usually exists in one copy.
Gravesend has always looked at the river rather than at London, and that shows in what arrives on the bench. Pilotage for the tidal Thames is coordinated from a Port of London Authority control centre in the town, and the data class that goes with it — passage plans, vessel movement logs, survey and hydrographic sets, pilot-boarding records — comes from nowhere else on this site. Northfleet, which posts as GRAVESEND on a DA11 address and has no district of its own, adds two more. Kimberly-Clark has made tissue at the mill there since 1923, and Britannia Refined Metals refines lead and silver on the riverside, so process and QA records, plant historians, assay and batch data and environmental monitoring all turn up here too. The cement trade that once ran nine works between Swanscombe and Gravesend has gone entirely — the last of them stopped in 2008 — and the chalk pits it worked are the reason Bluewater and Ebbsfleet stand where they do. Around all of that sit haulage yards working the A122 job, with tacho downloads and plant records; a market chartered in 1268 running on one till system; and small practices and family firms keeping client files and job costings on a single machine. None of it is collected. Media travels by tracked post to Guildford, where the intake lab is. Looking at it costs nothing; after that a fixed figure is written down and agreed, at £300 + VAT where one disk is involved and £500 + VAT upwards where several are.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What the river town sends in.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A river-office PC that no longer boots | Movement logs and survey sets held on that one disk | Off at the socket, and no repair utility on it |
| A works server with one disk amber since spring | Process and QA records the next audit will ask for | Power down, number each bay, post bare |
| A laboratory PC caught restarting itself | Assay and batch data, and no second copy of either | Leave it off; reinstalling would write over the records |
| A wharf recorder that shows nothing back | One disk writing every camera over the quay, and it is failing | Take the disk out and send that, nothing else |
| A market trader's card the till reads as blank | A season of takings and stock counts on the one card | Write nothing more to it and run no recovery app over it |
Before the parcel leaves DA11.
Four asked from DA12.
Is Ebbsfleet International the station for this?
Not for Gravesend, no. Ebbsfleet is DA10 with a SWANSCOMBE post town and belongs to Dartford borough. Gravesend has run its own high-speed trains to St Pancras and Stratford International from its own station since December 2009. And the thing outsiders most often get wrong about this stretch of Kent, said plainly: there has been no Eurostar out of Ebbsfleet since 31 March 2020, and the suspension has never been lifted. None of which changes a price. Nothing is collected from any address here.
The QA share will not mount. Do we open the box?
No. A NAS is the one unit that posts whole — lid on, disks left in their bays — since that is by some way the safest method of moving one. Power it off at the wall first, so the box is not left retrying, and do not let it begin rebuilding the volume whatever the front panel suggests. RAID sets and servers are handled in reverse: each disk is drawn out, its bay number written on it, the first one to fail kept with the others, and the disks posted without their chassis. Ring 0203 0868633 before anyone opens a server.
The assay records are on it. Who sees them here?
Nobody outside the lab. Jobs are booked under a case reference instead of a company name, the engineer opens only those areas of the disk the recovery calls for, and no copy goes anywhere else at all. Once your drive has been back with you for thirty days, the working copy is deleted. The company is Easy Data Recovery Ltd, ICO registration ZC173784, and the retention terms sit in the privacy policy.
From DA11, how does the drive actually get to you?
By post, and there is no other route. A post office counter in the town will take it, tracked and insured — insure against the value of the files, not the box they sit in — with a printed shipping form laid in with it. Most parcels are on the bench the working morning after they are sent. Post the drive by itself and keep the computer. Examination carries no charge and we pay the return leg.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Gravesend, on the same terms
Send it from Gravesend; the figure comes in writing.
Take the power off now and keep it off, because every retry can take more sectors with it. What it had been doing beforehand is worth passing on. The examination is not charged for, one figure follows on paper, and nothing billable happens before you agree to it.