AL1 to AL4, and Harpenden AL5 · St Albans
Data recovery for St Albans. A site record cannot be made twice. That file is the only copy of the ground.
St Albans is a city, and one with a high proportion of managers, senior officials and professionals. The working shape of that is several thousand one- and two-partner firms spread through AL1 to AL4: audit working papers and engagement letters kept under professional-indemnity retention, matter files and conveyancing packs, valuation reports and planning submissions, pension advice files and tax computations. Nearly all of it sits on one Windows machine with a backup drive plugged into the same desk. Two other sectors here have no parallel elsewhere on this patch. Development inside the Verulamium footprint brings a planning-condition field record, and that work is destructive by its nature — context and finds databases, site photography, geophysics and ground-penetrating-radar files, photogrammetry and laser-scan point clouds, drawn records and grey-literature reports, all describing ground that will never be in that state again. None of it can be observed a second time. At Harpenden, AL5, Rothamsted Research holds 330 hectares and a run of readings more than 180 years deep: the Broadbalk wheat plots have been recorded every season since 1843 and Park Grass since 1856, published through the e-RA database, with over 200 scientists working on the result. Nothing is collected in St Albans: media is posted, examined at no charge, and priced on paper before any chargeable work.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five jobs the AL postcodes send us.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A field unit's laptop back from a site record | Context photography, the finds database, the survey | Keep it switched off; send the drive alone |
| A practice server that stopped over a weekend | Matter files, the ledger and every scanned deed on it | No rebuild; note which bay each disk came from |
| A four-bay NAS in an AL1 accounts office | Audit working papers held under indemnity retention | Take the power off and post the unit as one piece |
| A research workstation that no longer finds a disk | Season on season of plot readings, kept locally | Cut the power; the disk travels alone |
| The household external that has begun clicking | Every photograph a family owns, held on that one disk | Leave it unplugged; the clicking is damage in progress |
Four things worth settling before the parcel leaves AL1.
What St Albans asks first.
Are Harpenden and the AL2 side covered as well as AL1?
All of it. AL1 to AL4 carry the city and its edges, AL5 is Harpenden, and the postcodes reach out to London Colney, Park Street, Redbourn, Wheathampstead and Colney Heath. Because no media is ever fetched by road, a practice off St Peter's Street and a converted barn beyond Sandridge are the same distance from a bench and pay the same figure.
One disk in our RAID has dropped. Is it safe to wait?
No, and that is exactly the trap. A set one disk short carries on serving files as though nothing had changed, so it is left running; then a second disk goes, and the lot halts in one go. Cut the power now. Number the disks against their bays before any of them leaves the chassis, failed member included, then send the drives on their own. Begin no rebuild. Jobs holding several disks open at £500 + VAT.
A survey is on a machine that will not start. Can it be hurried?
Two things change on an urgent booking. Your disk is imaged in front of the queue, and one engineer keeps it from first look to last rather than fitting it around other work. Ask for that on the call. The completion date comes when the diagnosis can justify one, not before. Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm.
Is there a St Albans address to hand a drive to?
No, and nowhere in London takes one over a counter either. Jobs are booked in at the intake lab; that is where the equipment for the work sits, and a device may be left there on a weekday. Nearly everyone posts it instead, tracked and insured. Nobody pays to have it examined, and the journey back is on us.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to St Albans, on the same terms
Box it in St Albans; an engineer normally has it next morning.
Do not power it up again. Before ringing, note down the last thing the machine managed successfully and the first thing it refused — the bench values that pairing above any guess at a cause. The look carries no charge. Until one figure has reached you in writing and been accepted, nothing chargeable is done.