W1 and SW1 · Westminster
Data recovery in Westminster. Harley Street imaging, Soho project files, Mayfair spreadsheets.
Eight square miles, and the postcode tells you which economy you are standing in. W1G, W1U and W1H are the Harley Street district, which is not one street but Wimpole, Welbeck, Weymouth, Queen Anne Street and Devonshire Place with it, where a private practice keeps ultrasound, MRI and OCT studies on a small local image store with dictated letters and consent forms beside them, in a Georgian townhouse with nowhere to put a proper system. Retention there outlives the hardware by a wide margin: eight years from an adult patient's last attendance, and for a child until the twenty-fifth birthday, or the twenty-sixth where they were seventeen at that visit. Ten minutes east, W1D and W1F are post-production, and what is exposed is not the LTO archive but the working set — Avid bins and MXF, a Resolve database, a Pro Tools session and the grade metadata for an afternoon the client already approved in the room. Mayfair and St James's, W1J, W1K, W1S and SW1Y, run pricing models and spreadsheets in firms of forty people with no IT floor, usually on one office NAS. The auction and gallery trade adds condition reports and object photography of works since sold and shipped overseas. Two corrections while you are here: W1T is Camden rather than Westminster, so Fitzrovia is genuinely split; and Harrods, which everybody files under Knightsbridge, is in Kensington and Chelsea. Nothing is collected anywhere in Westminster. Post the media tracked and insured; the examination costs nothing and the figure is written down first — £300 + VAT buys a single hard disk, £250 + VAT a card or a memory stick, and a job with several disks in it opens at £500 + VAT.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five jobs the W1 and SW1 postbag brings.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A post house project drive that will not mount | Avid bins and a Resolve database, mid-grade | Write nothing else to it; send it as it stands |
| A Harley Street practice server that has stopped | Ultrasound and OCT studies a practice must keep for years | Power off, mark each disk with its bay, send them without the chassis |
| The laptop a consultant carries between rooms | Dictated letters and billing, copied nowhere | Once it starts clicking, leave it alone |
| A gallery photography disk the Mac no longer sees | Condition images of a work already shipped overseas | Cut the power; the drive travels on its own |
| A Mayfair office NAS that will not mount | Ten years of pricing models, and no second box anywhere | Power off at the wall; the unit travels whole |
Four things worth knowing before it goes.
What Westminster callers ask.
The grade is booked for Thursday and the project drive has stopped. Can it go first?
Flag it urgent on the phone and it stays marked that way from the first call onwards. Imaging happens on the morning the parcel lands, before anything else logged that day gets looked at, and the moment a diagnosis is firm enough to stand behind, you get a completion date instead of a guess. Weekdays, 9am to 5:30pm, a person picks up.
The only copy is the one on that disk. What then?
Nothing is written to what you send. A read-only image comes first and every attempt after that is made against the copy, so your media goes home no different from how it turned up. What has been read off travels back on new media beside a file-by-file listing of what opened and what did not, and you see that listing before any money moves.
What paperwork comes with it? Finance will want it.
Everything, and none of it is charged for. The written figure is with you before any chargeable step happens. The itemised listing of what was recovered reaches you at the end for sign-off. The VAT invoice follows that. Where a disk has to be opened, half the figure falls due before that stage begins, and the quote says as much.
We are in Fitzrovia, not Mayfair. Is that still Westminster?
Partly, and the split is real. W1W is Westminster and W1T next door is Camden, and the two councils settled that wording in 2014, Fitzrovia West here and Fitzrovia East over the boundary. Either way it makes no difference, because nothing is collected: the postcode on the parcel changes neither price nor position in the queue. Post it tracked and insured.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Westminster, on the same terms
Send it from Westminster with your date on it.
Leave it switched off from here on; each restart spends more of what is still readable. The detail worth having ready is what the machine was doing in the second before it stopped. Examining it is free. One figure then comes back on paper, and nothing chargeable begins before you approve that figure.