LE13 and LE14 · Melton Mowbray and the Wolds villages
Melton Mowbray data recovery. A protected name is a paper trail; most of it is on one QA laptop with no copy.
Food traceability is what most of this town's bench work turns out to be. A Melton Mowbray pork pie has been a protected name since 2008, and a protected name is only worth holding while you can evidence it: batch and lot records, supplier declarations, HACCP logs, temperature exports, metal-detection and weights-and-measures records, label specifications, and the audit pack a retailer asks for. Almost all of that sits on a factory-floor PC or a QA manager's laptop, in a firm with nobody employed to look after either. Around it are Mars Petcare on Mill Street, Samworth Brothers' head office, Melton Building Society's regulated customer files, the units at Pera Business Park on Nottingham Road, and the Wolds farms behind them with their herd books, medicine records and movement records. Stilton itself is no longer made in the town — the Thorpe End creamery closed in 2024, and the closest of the four remaining PDO dairies is at Long Clawson in LE14 — but the paperwork the trade runs on has not gone anywhere. Nothing is collected: send the drive by tracked post, nobody is charged for the examination, and one written figure reaches you before any chargeable step — £300 + VAT on a single disk, £500 + VAT upwards once several are involved.
Ask an engineer, and the first look is free
0115 8220606
What comes in from around here.
Not yours? Open the fault finder →| What is happening | What brings it in | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| A QA laptop that stops at the maker's logo | The audit pack, the batch records and the label files together | Do not run a repair tool over it — post the disk to us |
| An external drive of label artwork, clicking on plug-in | Artwork and specifications with nothing else holding a copy | That noise is damage. Cut the power now |
| A factory-floor PC caught in a restart loop | The CCP logs and temperature exports the next audit needs | Leave it off — a reinstall would write over the logs |
| A tack-room NAS that will no longer mount | Herd books and medicine records share it with the office files | No rebuild: power it off and send the box complete |
| A sale-day card the camera now reads as empty | The card was pulled while the camera was still writing | Nothing written to it, no recovery app — send the card on |
Before the parcel goes anywhere.
Four questions from LE13.
Does an LE14 address pay more than one in the town?
It does not. Melton Mowbray pays what every other address pays, because there is only one published list. Nobody is charged for the look, and what the look produces is a single written figure that then holds: one hard disk, £300 + VAT; a memory card or a USB stick, £250 + VAT; and £500 + VAT as the opening figure on anything with several disks in it: a server, a NAS box, a RAID set. On most jobs, where nothing readable comes off, no bill follows.
Recipes and audit packs are on there. Who reads them?
Not one byte is written back to your disk. Everything begins with a read-only image, the recovery runs against that copy, and the original goes back in the state it reached the lab in. The paperwork shows a case number rather than a company; the engineer opens the files the job requires and leaves the rest shut; and thirty days on from your drive going home, whatever working copies remain get wiped. The privacy policy sets it all down.
The QA share will not mount this morning. Do we open it?
No — a NAS goes in the box whole, drives left where they are, which is much the safest way to move one. Cut the power at the wall so it is not sitting there retrying, and start no rebuild of the volume. Servers and RAID sets are dealt with the other way round: bare disks, and the bay order written on each of them. Ring us first if someone is about to open a chassis.
From Melton Mowbray, how does the drive actually reach you?
In the post, and that is the only way — no drive is taken over a counter here, and Nottingham has no public counter either. Any post office in the town will do: tracked, insured, and it is usually booked in the following working morning. Send the drive by itself, not the machine it came out of. The assessment costs nothing and we pay the carriage back.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
Next door to Melton Mowbray, on the same terms
Send it from LE13 and the figure comes back in writing.
Switch it off now and leave it that way — each retry can cost you sectors. Tell us how it was behaving beforehand. Looking at it is not charged for, the figure reaches you in writing, and no chargeable work begins until you say go.