W8, SW3, SW5, SW7 · Kensington and Chelsea
Data recovery, Kensington and Chelsea. One laptop, one external drive, no IT department.
The Royal Borough is long and thin, and its two ends do genuinely different work. At the southern end Exhibition Road carries the V&A, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, on the 87 acres the 1851 commissioners bought, with Imperial College beside them. What comes off those systems is collections management, digitised object records and 3D scanning — and the thing most people overlook, conservation and condition imaging, which describes an object on the day it was photographed and cannot be repeated once that object has been treated, sold or sent abroad. In SW3 the work turns clinical: the Royal Brompton is one of the five hospitals of Guy's and St Thomas', and imaging and correspondence there sit under retention rules counted in decades. But the number that describes this borough best is a domestic one. It is the share of working-age residents who are self-employed: a consultant, a dealer off Portobello Road, a designer, a photographer or a therapist whose whole trading history is on one laptop with one external drive behind it and nobody to ring. Two things outsiders get wrong: Chelsea's football ground is in Fulham, and Harrods, which everyone files under Knightsbridge, sits in this borough. Nothing is collected. Post it tracked and insured; the examination is free of charge and the figure goes on paper first — a memory card or stick £250 + VAT, one hard disk on its own £300 + VAT, and £500 + VAT upwards wherever a job holds several disks.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
The Royal Borough's postbag.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A dealer's laptop that stops at the maker's logo | Stock photography and provenance notes, on the local disk | Lift the drive out and post that on its own |
| A gallery's office server, stopped mid-week | Condition reports and object photography a client will ask to see | Power down, mark every disk with the bay it sat in, send them bare |
| Every screen in a small practice showing the same message | The backup ran nightly to a folder on the same PC | Photograph the message, pull the network lead, leave the power alone |
| An external drive that has started to click | Fifteen years of a sole trader's invoices, portfolio and client list | Once it clicks, do not plug it in again |
| A conservation studio PC that will not start | Pre-treatment imaging of an object already back with its owner | Send the disk; the studio machine stays where it is |
Packing it in the Royal Borough.
Questions we get from the Royal Borough.
Does this take in the whole borough, Earl's Court and Kensal Green as well?
It does: W8, W10, W11, SW3, SW5, SW7 and SW10, top of the borough to bottom. W8, SW3 and SW5 are the districts the Royal Borough has to itself; every other one is shared with a neighbour, and W10 answers to four authorities at once. None of that alters anything, because nothing is picked up by road. Media travels by tracked, insured post and the first look is free.
Everything I trade on is on one laptop. Where do I start?
With the power off. In this borough the customer very often is the business: a large share of working-age residents are self-employed, and for most of them the trading record, the client list and the portfolio share one machine. Undo the four screws, leave the rest of the laptop on the desk, and post the disk by itself. A single hard disk is £300 + VAT.
The conservation images were made before treatment. Can they come back?
Usually. A condition photograph or a 3D scan describes an object on one particular day, and once that object has been treated, sold or shipped out of the country the day does not come round again. So the original never gets written to, and every attempt is made on a read-only image of it. Send the drive by itself and leave the workstation standing. You see a file-by-file listing before the invoice.
Will anybody come out to Chelsea or South Kensington to collect?
No, and nobody has ever been sent out, which is part of why the prices can be published in the first place. A tracked, insured parcel reaches the bench sooner than a driver would, and it joins the queue on the morning it lands. If the item is an awkward shape, ring 0203 0868633 and we will work the packing out with you over the phone.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Kensington and Chelsea, on the same terms
Send it from the Royal Borough and the work starts as it lands.
Power off, and leave it that way. Each further restart trades readable sectors for nothing at all. Before you ring, work out what the machine was doing at the moment it stopped, because that is where the bench begins. The first look is free, the figure arrives on paper, and you approve it before anything chargeable happens.