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ADR / Towns and boroughs / Lambeth

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 two boroughs joined at Kennington, and both an SE and an SW address. North of that line, Waterloo and the South Bank hold a band of national institutions a few hundred metres deep — the National Theatre, the Old Vic and the Young Vic, the Southbank Centre, the BFI, Morley College and King's College — with St Thomas' and the Evelina standing in Lambeth, not in Westminster opposite. Lambeth's 2022 South Bank strategy counted 1,440 businesses in that one neighbourhood, holding video and audio masters, digitisation output, ticketing databases, lighting states and show-control files on shared storage. A show file gone mid-run has a performance time on it. South of Kennington the pattern inverts — independent shops, record labels and DJ libraries around Brixton, where Morleys has traded since the 1880s, and one-person practices through Clapham, Streatham and West Norwood, nearly all of it on a single machine. Only SE27, SW2 and SW9 are wholly Lambeth: SW8 is shared with Wandsworth, and the SIS building at Vauxhall Cross, SE1, is Lambeth while Battersea Power Station, SW11 and less than a mile off, is Wandsworth. Nothing is collected in Lambeth. Media travels tracked and insured, assessment on arrival is free, and the price goes on paper before anything else: cards and sticks at £250 + VAT, one disk on its own at £300 + VAT, multi-disk work from £500 + VAT.

Cover it for what is on it, not what it cost · we pay the return Looking at it costs nothing What we quote is what you are charged

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 onWhat arrives from hereWhere that leaves you
A show-control PC that stops on a get-in dayCue stacks, states and the desk file for Friday's openingLeave it switched off and send just the disk
A digitisation array that has dropped a memberMasters and archive transfers that were only ever made onceStop any rebuild, write the bay on each disk, send them bare
The portable SSD a sound engineer moves between venuesIn and out of a flight case, show after showClicking means stop, not one more try
The till PC in a Brixton shop cannot find its diskSales, stock and supplier accounts, kept in one placeKeep the power off it and post the drive by itself
A Streatham home-office NAS that will not mountTen years of a one-person practice, with nothing behind itPower it down and send the box as it stands
Packing it and posting it:print the shipping form and slide it in beside the drive. Tracked and insured is how the parcel wants to reach the intake lab; the journey home is paid by us. Packing, properly done, is described on theguide to packing and posting.

Four things to settle before it leaves Lambeth.

Why the parcel travels, not youNothing can be handed over in Lambeth, and there is no public counter anywhere in London. The imaging rigs, the donor shelves and the bench all sit together at the intake lab in Guildford, and that is the part which cannot move; a drive can. Waterloo will put you on a train and the Victoria line will bring you back to Brixton, but neither end of that journey has a counter, so the parcel goes in your place — tracked, insured, while you get on with the week.
Files that cannot be made twiceThe heaviest files in this borough come out of venues and studios: a digitisation master, a multitrack session, a lighting state built over a fortnight of technicals, the production photography a press office will want next season. Most of it lives on the one volume it was written to, and the copy everybody assumes exists usually turns out to be the same drive under another name.
Tell us the date you are up againstGive the date at the booking stage. A venue with a performance on Saturday needs its show files by Saturday, not in due course, and a job carrying a stated date is scheduled against that date instead of joining the general queue. A completion date follows as soon as the diagnosis is firm enough to carry one.
The price, in fullLooking at it is free, and it stays free whatever the answer proves to be. The figure that follows is set down on paper before any billable work, and it does not move later. Cards and memory sticks come to £250 + VAT. One hard disk on its own, whatever has gone wrong with it, is £300 + VAT. Several disks in one job — an array, a NAS, a server — start at £500 + VAT. On most jobs the fee turns on the result: nothing back, nothing to pay. Return postage is ours.

Four questions Lambeth asks.

We have a performance on Thursday and the show file will not open. Can it go first?

Ask for that at the booking stage and it is logged as urgent then, not afterwards. The media is imaged the day it lands, ahead of the rest of that day's intake, and one engineer stays with it rather than passing it along a bench. Once the diagnosis will carry a date, you get a finish date instead of an estimate. Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm.

This digitisation master exists once. What happens to the disk?

Nothing is written to the original at any stage. The first step is a read-only image, made before anything else is attempted, and every later step runs against that image; your media goes home in the condition it arrived in. What comes back is written to new media, with a list of every file recovered and every file that could not be read, for you to read before you pay.

Our finance office will want paperwork. What does it get?

Everything listed, and none of it billed separately. The price goes on paper before any billable step and it does not move; an itemised list of what was recovered comes to you for sign-off at the end; a VAT invoice follows that. Opening a disk under clean air means half is payable first, and the quote sets that out rather than raising it later.

Is this SE1 only, or does it reach Brixton and Streatham too?

The whole borough, on one set of terms — Waterloo and Kennington in SE1 and SE11, Brixton and Stockwell in SW2 and SW9, Clapham and Vauxhall in SW4 and SW8, West Norwood SE27, Streatham SW16. Since nothing is picked up from any address, where you happen to be alters neither the price nor the order of the queue. Media should travel tracked and insured. Assessment on arrival is free of charge, and the return postage falls to us.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

Laptops and desk machines → After a ransomware incident → Heat, soot, water damage → Every borough and town →

Next door to Lambeth, on the same terms

Southwark → Wandsworth → Merton and Wimbledon → Croydon → Westminster → City of London →

From SE1 or SW9, let the parcel do the travelling.

Take the power off and keep it off; every restart costs a little more. The single most useful thing you can tell us is what the machine was doing in the seconds before it stopped. There is no charge for the look itself, whatever it finds. One figure follows in writing, and no billable work starts before you approve it.

0203 0868633

Get it assessed Sending it to Guildford