W4 and TW3, TW4, TW5, TW7, TW8, TW13 and TW14 · Chiswick to East Bedfont
Data recovery, Hounslow. The day's rushes, Isleworth to Soho, on one drive — the only copy making the trip.
The borough runs from a Georgian riverside high street to the airport service estates, and the Great West Road is the thread through it. At the eastern end the work is media. Sky's campus at Grant Way, Isleworth — which everyone calls Osterley — occupies nine buildings, three of them holding television studios, and acts as a playout centre for a large part of the group's channels. Around it sit the freelance edit assistants, small post houses, camera and lighting hire firms and motion-graphics contractors who carry project files, EDLs, graded masters, graphics packages and rushes on portable drives between Isleworth, Chiswick and Soho; a hire company's asset register and test records live on much the same machine. At the western end it is freight and airport services: bonded warehouses and freight sheds around East Bedfont with consignment and bonded-stock records, coach and car-park operators with booking, rota and recorder systems, catering firms with manifest and traceability records. In between are Chiswick High Road practices holding client files under professional obligation, the brewery at Chiswick with its batch and quality records, and Brentford's mix of small firms. Hounslow has the fifth-highest poverty rate of any London borough on Trust for London's count, and the contrast runs geographically, so this page is written for both ends of it: one published list, no counter anywhere, and a drive that travels by post.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What W4 and the TWs send in.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| An edit assistant's shuttle drive, no longer seen | A week of rushes and the project file, with a transmission date on it | Stop copying from it, unplug it and post the drive by itself |
| A post house NAS that has dropped its volume | Graded masters, graphics packages and every EDL for the job | No rebuild. Cut the power at the wall and send the box whole |
| A freight office server that stopped overnight | Bonded stock, consignment records and the manifests behind them | Have an image taken today |
| A car park recorder that plays nothing | One disk writing every camera, hour after hour, for years | Get the disk out before those cameras record over it |
| A Chiswick practice laptop that will not start | Client files held under a professional obligation to keep them | Leave it off and send the disk on its own |
Four points to settle before it goes.
What Hounslow asks first.
TW6 is Heathrow. Is that a Hounslow job?
TW6 is a Hounslow post town, but the airport it covers sits in the London Borough of Hillingdon — the neatest postcode trap in west London. Either way it makes no difference to you. Hounslow's own districts are W4 Chiswick, TW3 to TW5, TW7 Isleworth, TW8 Brentford and the two at Feltham, TW13 and TW14, and all of them post their media to the same lab against the same list.
There is a transmission date. How fast?
Say the date when you ring and the drive goes on an imager before the general queue, with one engineer on it throughout. File-system work usually finishes within two working days of your go-ahead. Anything mechanical runs longer, because matching donor parts have to be found first. You will know from the outset which sort of job it is, rather than finding out midway.
The work is under an NDA. Is posting it wise?
Yes. There is no client name on the job sheet, only a case number. The engineer opens the files the recovery needs and nothing else. Nothing goes outside the laboratory, and the copies retained here are deleted thirty days from the drive's return. The privacy policy carries the detail.
Anywhere in Chiswick to hand a drive over?
No, and nowhere else in London. All of it is done in one laboratory, so the media makes the journey while you stay at work. Post it tracked and insured from W4 or TW7 and an engineer normally has it by the next working morning; the postage home is ours.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Hounslow, on the same terms
Post it from W4 and the figure comes before the work.
Power it down and leave it alone. Tell us how it was behaving beforehand — a click, a slow read, a volume that stopped appearing. Looking at it costs nothing, the figure follows in writing, and what happens next is your call.