Waterloo SE1 · Brixton SW2 and SW9 · West Norwood SE27
Data recovery, Lambeth. A show file gone the day before a run. Power off — the machine is still overwriting.
Lambeth is comprised of two boroughs meeting at Kennington and has addresses for both the SE and SW postcode areas. On the north side of the boundary lie Waterloo and the South Bank, which house numerous nationally significant organisations in a band a few hundred metres deep. Included among these organisations are the National Theatre, the Old Vic and the Young Vic, as well as the Southbank Centre, the British Film Institute (BFI), Morley College and King's College, and also St Thomas' Hospital and the Evelina Children's Hospital, both of which are located in Lambeth rather than in Westminster directly opposite. Lambeth's 2022 South Bank strategy identified 1,440 business operations working within this neighbourhood alone. These businesses have video and audio masters, digitisation output, ticketing databases, lighting states and show-control files stored on shared storage systems. If a show file is lost during a run it has a performance time hanging over it. To the south of Kennington, the pattern reverses: independent shops, record labels and DJ libraries exist around Brixton, where Morleys has been trading since the 1880s, and single-person practices operate throughout Clapham, Streatham and West Norwood using almost exclusively one computer. Only SE27, SW2 and SW9 lie wholly within the Borough of Lambeth: SW8 contains some of Wandsworth, and the SIS building at Vauxhall Cross, SE1, is in Lambeth but Battersea Power Station, SW11 and less than a mile off, is in Wandsworth. We do not pick up from Lambeth, nor does there exist a counter in either Lambeth or London. First a quote is required, by telephone or with our form, prior to sending us your media tracked and insured; otherwise, once you have it, you may bring your media to our Guildford intake lab yourself at any time Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, with no appointment needed. There is no charge for assessing what must be done upon arrival, and prices are set out in writing prior to doing anything further: cards and sticks are £250 + VAT, a single disk on its own is £300 + VAT, and multi-disk projects are priced from £500 + VAT.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five jobs that arrive from Lambeth.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| PC used to control shows that shuts down on a get-in day | Files containing cue lists, states and the desk file for Friday's opening | Leave it switched off and obtain a quote; once the quote is received, send just the disk. |
| Digitisation array that has lost one of its disks | Archive transfers and masters, only ever produced one time | Do not attempt to rebuild, write each bay number onto each disk, obtain a quote, then send the disks bare |
| The portable SSD a sound engineer moves from venue to venue | In and out of a flight case, show after show | Clicking means stop, not one more go |
| A Brixton shop's till PC can't see its own disk | All sales, stock and supplier accounts in one place | Turn the power off, get a quote first, then send the drive by itself |
| A Streatham home-office NAS that won't mount | Ten years of a one-person practice with nothing backing it up | Power it down, get a quote first, then post the disks labelled by bay if possible, otherwise just the box as it is |
Four things to settle before it leaves Lambeth.
Four questions Lambeth asks.
We have a performance on Thursday and the show file will not open. Can it go first?
You can request this when booking, and it is then logged as urgent immediately, not afterwards. Your media is imaged on the day it arrives, ahead of the rest of that day's intake, and one engineer is assigned to it until it is complete, so it does not get passed along a bench. Once the diagnosis is firm enough to carry a date, you receive a finish date instead of a best guess. We operate weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm.
This digitisation master exists once. What happens to the disk?
At no point during the process is anything ever written to the original. We create a read-only image of the media as the very first step, before anything else is attempted, and all subsequent steps are performed on that read-only image, so your media is returned to you in exactly the condition it was received in. What comes back is written to new media, along with a report detailing all files successfully recovered and those which could not be read, and you can read it before you pay.
Our finance office will want paperwork. What does it get?
Everything has been listed, and none of it has been billed individually. The charge is written into your agreement prior to doing anything that will generate a bill, and therefore never changes. Once we complete the processing, you get a detailed report of every file that was successfully retrieved from the disk, you review it, sign it off, and then we send your VAT invoice. If there is a need to open a drive, you pay half of the agreed fee in advance; this is noted in your initial quote and would not be raised at a later time.
Is this SE1 only, or does it reach Brixton and Streatham too?
We can provide our service, on one set of terms, for clients anywhere in the London Borough of Lambeth. This includes Brixton and Stockwell (SW2 and SW9); Clapham and Vauxhall (SW4 and SW8); Waterloo and Kennington (SE1 and SE11); West Norwood (SE27) and Streatham (SW16). We do not collect from client premises. As a result, both the cost of our services and your position in the queue are independent of where you reside. First, to obtain a quotation, please contact us via phone or complete our online quote form. Once you have received your quotation, you can send your devices to us via tracked and insured postal services, or drop them off personally during office hours at our Guildford intake lab. Assessments made while your devices are at our laboratory are complimentary, and the return postage of your devices after assessment and/or recovery is always paid for by us. If you would like to visit us to deliver your devices in person, the intake lab is open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed).
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Lambeth, on the same terms
From SE1 or SW9, let the parcel do the travelling.
Please turn off the machine and leave it off; every restart costs a little more. The single most useful information you can provide regarding your situation is what the machine was doing in the few seconds leading up to when it failed. There is no charge for assessing your media, regardless of what is found. One price is then quoted to you in writing, and nothing billable starts before you approve it.