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 of the economies within it you are standing in. W1G and the edge of W1U are the Harley Street district, which is not one street but includes Wimpole Street, Welbeck Street, Weymouth Street, Queen Anne Street and Devonshire Place, where a private practice keeps its ultrasound, MRI and OCT studies on a small local image storage system, with dictated letters and consent forms beside them, in an old Georgian townhouse with no space to put a proper system. Retention there outlives the hardware by a wide margin: these studies must be kept for eight years from an adult patient's last visit, and for a child until the patient's twenty-fifth birthday, or until the twenty-sixth birthday if they were seventeen years of age at that visit. Ten minutes east of Harley Street, W1D and W1F are the heart of post-production, and what is exposed there is not the LTO archive but rather the short-term working set used to complete projects: 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, are used by firms running pricing models and spreadsheets, typically companies of forty employees with no dedicated IT department, and these firms typically use a single office NAS for storing their models. The art world of galleries and auction houses adds condition reports and photographs of artworks that have since been sold and sent overseas. Two corrections while you are here: most of W1T lies in the borough of Camden and not Westminster, thus making Fitzrovia truly divided; and Harrods, which everyone files under Knightsbridge, actually lies in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea. No media is ever collected from any location in Westminster, and there is no service counter in Westminster or anywhere in London. Get a quote from us first: please call us or fill in our quote request form. Once you receive the quote, you may post us your media via a tracked and insured delivery method, or alternatively you can drop it off at our Guildford intake lab, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (appointment not required). The initial examination costs nothing, and all subsequent fees are quoted upfront in writing prior to commencement of work: £300 + VAT for a single hard disk, £250 + VAT for a card or memory stick, and for jobs requiring multiple disks, prices begin 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Post house project drive that will not mount | Avid bins and a Resolve database, mid-grade | Do not write anything further to it. Get a quote first. Send it as-is. |
| Harley Street practice server that has died | Ultrasound and OCT studies a medical practice must keep long-term | Shut off the power. Label each disk with its bay. Get a quote first. Send them without the chassis. |
| The laptop a consultant carries between rooms | Dictated letters and billing, never copied anywhere else | When it starts clicking, leave it alone. |
| Gallery photography disk that is no longer seen by the Mac | Condition images of works already sent overseas | Cut the power. Get a quote first. Then the drive travels solo. |
| Mayfair office NAS that won't mount. | Ten years of pricing models and no second box anywhere | Turn it off at the wall. Get a quote first. Then send the disks labelled by bay if possible; otherwise the whole unit travels. |
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?
When you flag something as urgent by telephone, it will remain flagged as such from that first call onwards. Imaging takes place on the morning the package arrives, before any other items logged that day are examined. Immediately after a sufficient level of certainty is achieved regarding the diagnosis, you receive a completion date rather than an estimated date. Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, a person picks up the phone.
The only copy is the one on that disk. What then?
No information is ever added to what you submit. A read-only image is made first, and any subsequent attempts to recover data are done using that copy of the original media; therefore your media goes home exactly as it arrived. When data is extracted from the media, it is returned to you on new media along with a detailed file-by-file report of what opened and what did not. This list is provided to you prior to any monies being exchanged.
What paperwork comes with it? Finance will want it.
Everything comes with it, and none of it is charged for. The written figure you owe is determined prior to proceeding with any chargeable step. The final itemised list of all the data extracted is provided to you at the conclusion of this process for verification purposes. The VAT invoice follows subsequently. If we have to open your disk, you pay half of the quoted price prior to opening it. The quote states as much.
We are in Fitzrovia, not Mayfair. Is that still Westminster?
Yes, partially, and the division is real. Westminster is represented by W1W, while most of W1T next door is in Camden. In 2014 both councils settled on that wording, "Fitzrovia West" for the Westminster side and "Fitzrovia East" for the side over the boundary. Either way it does not matter, because we do not collect items from you, and regardless of which postcode is used on your package, it will not affect either the cost or where in line it sits. Please obtain a quote prior to sending us your package (either via the phone or using our online quotation form). Then post it to us via a tracked service and insure it, or drop it off in person at our Guildford intake laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm. No appointment is required.
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.
From this point forward keep it turned off, as each power-up uses up some of what is still readable. What you want to have ready is what the machine was doing in the seconds before it quit. A diagnostic is free. One written figure will then arrive, and no chargeable work will begin until you agree with that figure.