KT1 to KT9 · Kingston, Surbiton and New Malden
Data recovery for Kingston. A high street in two scripts, no Tube, and a great many one-machine businesses.
Kingston upon Thames has no Underground station and no TfL rail station of any kind: nine South Western Railway stations, all running to Waterloo, with the A3 bypass through Tolworth, New Malden and Coombe doing the rest. The commercial base is retail and services at scale — the council calls it London's third largest retail centre. New Malden is the part outsiders get wrong. About 10,000 Korean residents live there, roughly 20,000 across the wider area, with Korean supermarkets, restaurants, churches and language classes, and a Sri Lankan Tamil community too. It is a working suburban high street, not a destination written up by food writers, and the businesses on it keep accounts, correspondence and customer records wholly or partly in Korean, very often on the one machine that also holds the family photographs. Character encoding and non-Latin filenames survive a recovery intact, which is worth saying plainly because it is what people ring to ask. Around that sit Kingston University's four campuses and 18,815 students, Lidl GB's head office at Tolworth since January 2022, Unilever's Sunlight House, opened here in July 2026, and the resort at Chessington. None of it is collected. The media posts in, tracked and covered; examination is free of charge; and one figure goes on paper first. Cards and sticks, £250 plus VAT; a single drive, £300 plus VAT; a recorder, £400 plus VAT; and from £500 plus VAT where the job holds a second disk.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
The five KT sends in most often.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A retail server the tills can no longer reach | Stock, EPOS history and supplier accounts for a trading year | Take the power off, number the bays, post bare disks |
| The one machine in the back of the shop | Trading records, the customer list, the family album | Send the disk on its own; the case stays with you |
| An external that lives in a student's bag | Three years of research and a thesis with no copy behind it | More of these arrive than anything else; unplug it |
| A two-disk NAS running on one since the spring | The alert it sent went to a mailbox nobody owns | Each disk is imaged first; nothing is rebuilt before that |
| Knocked off a desk, and clicking ever since | A laptop going between four campuses collects more knocks than you think | Do not power it up again; the next try may be the last |
What the post costs, and what the job costs.
The four questions KT asks most.
Our records are in Korean. Can those be recovered?
They can. Character encoding and non-Latin filenames come through a recovery unchanged, so a Korean or Tamil filename returns spelled as it was written, and so does the text held in the file. Nothing about KT3 is treated as a special case on price or on handling. Since we collect from nowhere, a Kingston practice and a New Malden shop each post the drive and each get the free examination.
We are Worcester Park in KT4. Does that count as Kingston?
Yes — though KT4 itself is split between Kingston, Merton, Sutton and the Surrey boundary. Worth knowing more generally: a KT postcode is not a Kingston postcode. Only KT5 lies wholly in the borough, and the higher KT numbers run out into Surrey. None of that alters anything here. The borough has no Underground and no TfL rail station of any kind, so what a job needs is a post office — hand the parcel over on a weekday, tracked and covered, and an engineer usually opens it the next morning. The examination costs nothing and the return leg is paid by us.
The shop's books and the family photographs share one disk.
That is the commonest shape of job out of New Malden, and it alters nothing about the price: one disk is one disk, £300 plus VAT. What it does alter is the listing. Before any money moves you are shown a file-by-file account of what was retrieved, so the trading records, the customer details and the pictures can each be checked separately. Working copies made here are deleted a full thirty days after the drive goes back to you.
What packing does a drive need?
Enough that it cannot move at all. Shifting about in transit is what does the damage, so bag it against static where there is one to hand, then fill the box out until the drive is held still — the carton it came in originally is usually right. Send it tracked. Insure against what the disk holds, not what you paid for it. A printed shipping form goes in too. The packing page carries the detail, and the journey back is on us.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Kingston upon Thames, on the same terms
Post it from Kingston — the first look is free.
Turn it off and let it stay off. What the machine was part way through when it stopped is the useful thing to tell us — a till run, a batch of scans, a file half saved. Looking is free of charge, and the figure set down afterwards is yours to accept or refuse.