E15, E16 and E20 · Stratford and Newham
Data recovery in Stratford and Newham. A show opens on the day it opens — the trouble with the drawings disk.
E20 is the oddest postcode in London: it was made up for Walford in EastEnders, and Royal Mail later issued it for real to the Olympic Park and Stratford City. Almost everything around it runs to dates that will not move. An exhibition contractor working ExCeL — 1.3 million sq ft since the extension opened in July 2025, and better than 400 events a year — needs the stand CAD and the rigging drawings right on the morning the show opens, not the week after. An event crew comes away with camera media from something that happened once. A post-production freelancer around the Olympic Park — Here East, the 1.2 million sq ft building that was the Olympic broadcast centre and now holds university campuses and Plexal, is just over the Hackney line — works off shuttle drives. Survey firms on one of the biggest development pipelines in London hold BIM models and point clouds of ground that has since been cleared and built over. And across E6, E7, E12, E13 and E15 sit thousands of shops, restaurants, cab offices and salons running on one PC nobody has ever copied. Nothing is fetched from Newham. The disk travels by post, the examination costs you nothing, and one figure is agreed in writing before any chargeable work: £250 + VAT cards and sticks, £300 + VAT a single disk, £400 + VAT a recorder, from £500 + VAT for anything multi-disk.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What arrives from E15 and E16.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A shuttle drive back from post that will not mount | Graded rushes and project files from one week of work | Write nothing further to it; send it as found |
| An exhibition contractor's PC that will not start | Stand CAD and rig drawings for a show that opens Tuesday | The disk comes out and travels; the PC does not |
| A survey drive holding point clouds of cleared ground | Ground that has since been cleared and built on | Power it down before another member goes |
| A laptop wanting a BitLocker key nobody kept | It encrypted itself at first sign-in and the 48 digits went nowhere | Try the Microsoft account it was first set up under; the key often sits there |
| A shop PC in E13 that has not restarted since a mains fault | Ten years of accounts, the supplier list and the till exports | Nobody should reinstall Windows; the disk itself is what travels |
Packing it so it reaches the bench intact.
Asked most often in E15.
Is there anywhere in Stratford to hand a disk in?
Nowhere in the borough, and no public counter anywhere in London. Every part of the job — imagers, donor stock, the bench — shares one room at the intake lab, so the thing that moves is the disk. Post it tracked and insured from any post office in E15 or E16 and an engineer normally opens the box the following working morning. The look is free and the return postage is ours.
Nobody here does the IT. What does finding out cost?
Finding out is free. One written figure comes back and it does not shift afterwards: £300 + VAT is the figure for one hard disk, £250 + VAT for cards and USB sticks. The list of what was recovered is yours to read before any money changes hands, and where the files cannot be got back there is usually no charge whatever. No phones and no tablets.
The disk holds client details. Is posting it a risk?
It is booked and tracked under a case reference, so no client name goes near the paperwork. An engineer opens only what a recovery actually calls for, nothing leaves the lab, and the working copy is deleted a month after your drive is back in your hands. What is kept, and for how long, is set out in the privacy policy.
The stand-build server has been a disk down since the last show.
Power off at the socket now, and no rebuild. Finishing a rebuild is what turns one failed disk into two, because the tired member goes during the rebuild rather than before it. A NAS box then travels assembled, in its own case, with nothing pulled out. Servers and RAID sets are handled the opposite way: every disk out, every disk numbered by bay.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Newham, on the same terms
Any post office in E15 will do — tracked and insured.
Leave the power off it from here on; every restart chips away at what is still readable. Say what the machine had in hand at the moment it stopped — a build overnight, an export, a card being copied off. The look is free; the figure after it is written down, and nothing chargeable starts before you approve it.