TW1, TW9, TW11 and SW13
Richmond data recovery. Britain's national archive is in this borough. So is a great deal of work in one copy.
Richmond upon Thames is the only London borough with land on both banks of the river, and the two banks send different work. At Kew stand two separate institutions a few hundred metres apart: The National Archives, whose Discovery catalogue lists more than 32 million record descriptions with over nine million records available to download, and the Royal Botanic Gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003 holding a herbarium of roughly seven million specimens, a fungarium of about 1.25 million dried fungi, a DNA bank and an archive of more than half a million items. Work of that kind runs on specimen imaging at very high resolution, sequencing output and geospatial sets, and it sits on a disk before it sits anywhere else. Across the water at Teddington the National Physical Laboratory does the country's measurement, so calibration certificates, instrument logs and datasets whose entire worth is their traceability live on machines here; and Twickenham and St Margarets keep the borough's post-production sound trade, where a session, its stems and its mix passes are attached to a studio day already booked. Around all of that is the borough's real bulk: architects and chartered surveyors, solicitors and therapists, one-person consultancies, and households with thirty years of photographs on a single drive. Nothing is collected in Richmond or anywhere else. Media travels by tracked, insured post; examining it is free; and the figure goes on paper before any chargeable step — £250 + VAT a card or stick, £300 + VAT one drive, £400 + VAT a recorder, £500 + VAT upwards once a second disk is in the job.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five faults that arrive from both banks.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A shared session volume the studio kit cannot see | Sessions, stems and mix passes against a booked studio day | Power down; label every disk with its bay; post them bare |
| The workstation standing beside the calibration bench | Bought with the instrument, and untouched since that day | Only the disk needs to travel; leave the box behind |
| An external carried between the Kew buildings | Specimen imaging and sequencing runs, in one copy | The job this bench sees most; stop using it now |
| A mirrored pair in a home office, down to one disk | It has run on a single disk since a date nobody noted | Every member is imaged before anything is rebuilt |
| It went over on the desk, and now it clicks | Kit carried from one building to another takes knocks you cannot see | Leave it off; every power-up costs you readable sectors |
Getting it here, and what you will pay.
Four questions this borough asks.
Does a Barnes SW13 address count as Richmond?
It does. The borough carries four post towns of its own — Hampton, Richmond, Teddington and Twickenham — while Barnes and Mortlake are addressed plainly as London, SW13 and SW14. All sit on one price list. Nothing is collected from any, so a Kew laboratory and a Teddington sole trader both post the drive, both get the free first look, and neither pays for the leg home.
The shared session volume has stopped. Do we power it down?
Yes, at the wall, and before you go home rather than after. Completing a rebuild means the controller reads every sector of every disk still spinning, and where a set has spent years taking session material that sustained load is what pushes the next worn member past its limit. Break off half way and the position is worse than the original fault left it. So the power comes off first. Number each disk by the bay it came out of, and post them as bare drives. Only a NAS travels assembled, in its own case. Once a job holds more than one disk it sits in the £500 + VAT band.
The provenance chain matters as much as the files. What is issued?
Nothing is written back to the media you send. A read-only image comes off it first, every later step runs against that image, and the original goes home exactly as it reached us. One fixed figure is agreed on paper ahead of any chargeable step. At the end you hold the recovered files on new media, the case reference the job was booked under from the start, and a file-by-file listing marking which read cleanly, which read short, and which would not read at all.
How should the drive be wrapped and sent?
Movement is what damages a drive in transit, so take the movement away. Bag it against static if there is one to hand, then pack out every face of the box until the drive cannot shift — the carton it was supplied in usually does that job. Send it tracked, and set the insured value against what is on the disk rather than what the disk cost. A printed shipping form rides in with it. The rest is on the packing page, and we pay for the journey back.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Richmond upon Thames, on the same terms
Post it from Richmond — the first look is free.
Keep it powered off. It helps to know what it was busy with when it stopped — a session bounce, an instrument logging overnight, a scan job. The look costs nothing, and no chargeable work begins until the written figure has your yes.