IG1 to IG6, E18 · Redbridge
Redbridge data recovery. Terabytes of camera cards from one Saturday. And a family still waiting to see them.
Ilford gave its name to photographic film. Alfred Harman began making gelatino-bromide dry plates there in 1879, and the Roden Street factory ran until it closed in 1976; the brand went elsewhere; the works did not. That trade has a digital descendant, and it is among the busiest sources of work in the borough: wedding and event photographers and videographers across Ilford, Gants Hill and Barkingside, filling terabytes of camera cards for a day that cannot be staged twice. Around them sits a settled professional suburb. Ilford town centre had around 145,000 square metres of town-centre floorspace on the GLA's 2013 health check, and the borough is thick with accountants, solicitors, immigration advisers, dental and GP practices, private tutors and supplementary schools — people holding somebody else's records under an obligation, on a machine no IT department ever specified. Minicab and courier operators keep dispatch data and driver records; restaurants and shops keep EPOS, stock and supplier files; forecourts and small retailers run cameras to a standalone recorder, where the disk in the unit holds the only record of the past month. Get the postcodes right, because the IG area is not a borough and is not all in London: IG1 to IG6 are the ILFORD post town and are Redbridge, IG7 straddles Chigwell in Essex and Hainault in Redbridge, IG8 is shared with Waltham Forest, IG9 and IG10 are Buckhurst Hill and Loughton, and IG11 is Barking. Hainault is Redbridge. E18 South Woodford is wholly Redbridge, Wanstead's E11 is shared, and Chadwell Heath's RM6 is split three ways. Redbridge is a district, a station and a roundabout as well as a borough — and there is no red bridge to see, the brick one over the Roding having gone in 1921. Nothing is handed over here. Post it tracked. Examination costs nothing; a written figure precedes any chargeable work.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
What Ilford and Woodford send.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A photographer's laptop that will not wake | A Saturday's card offload, and the clients expecting an album | Keep the power off it and send the disk alone |
| A card the camera now reports as unformatted | Every frame from a day nobody can arrange again | Leave it unformatted; post the card as it stands |
| A practice PC that stops partway through starting | Patient imaging and the appointment system, on that machine | Power it off; nobody reinstalls first |
| A forecourt recorder that stopped writing | The last month exists only on the disk in that unit | Unplug the recorder at the wall and remove its disk |
| A solicitor's drive that has begun clicking | Years of scanned correspondence held under obligation | Stop using it; each restart costs reads you cannot spare |
Before the parcel leaves you.
What Redbridge asks.
Does an IG postcode always mean Redbridge?
It does not, and this is where outsiders come unstuck. IG1 to IG6 carry the ILFORD post town and are Redbridge: Ilford, Gants Hill, Seven Kings, Goodmayes, Clayhall, Barkingside and Fairlop. IG7 straddles Chigwell in Essex and Hainault in Redbridge, IG8 is split with Waltham Forest, IG9 and IG10 are Buckhurst Hill and Loughton, and IG11 is Barking in a different borough. Hainault is Redbridge. E18 South Woodford is wholly Redbridge and Wanstead's E11 is shared.
A whole wedding is on those cards. Who else gets to see it?
An engineer, and nobody else. Nothing is ever written to the card. A read-only image is made, and every attempt afterwards runs against that image rather than the media, so the card returns exactly as it came. The job sheet carries a case reference in place of your firm. No copy leaves this laboratory. Thirty days after the media has gone back, the working copy here is erased; the privacy policy sets that out in detail.
The practice server upstairs will not mount. Do we open it?
Not if it is a NAS. Cut its power so it stops retrying, leave the disks in their bays and send the unit whole; nobody should attempt a rebuild. RAID sets and servers go the other way — lift the disks out and mark each one with the bay it occupied. Ring before any chassis is opened. Jobs with several disks start at £500 + VAT.
How does a drive get there from Ilford?
Through the post. Redbridge has no counter and neither has London, so it is the parcel that moves. Hand it over tracked and insured at any IG post office; it usually reaches the bench on the following working morning. The disk on its own is enough, and the computer can stay behind. Examining it costs you nothing; we pay for its journey home.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Redbridge, on the same terms
Post it from any IG counter; the look costs you nothing.
Leave it switched off — each restart makes the job harder, not easier. When you ring, say what the drive had been doing at the point it stopped. Looking costs nothing; the figure that follows is put in writing, and nothing chargeable is begun until you have agreed it.