LL55 · Y Maes and Doc Fictoria · Caernarfon
Data recovery in Caernarfon. The most Welsh-speaking town in Wales keeps its work on drives.
Caernarfon is the most Welsh-speaking town in Wales — at the 2011 census 77.0% of people here gave their national identity as Welsh only — and Welsh is the working language of the place, not a flourish on the signs. Cyngor Gwynedd runs the county from Shirehall Street, so the town is full of council teams, solicitors, land agents and accountants working in two languages. It is a centre for Welsh-language television as well: production companies edit here, and a single commission can sit on one RAID in a suite. Add the castle-and-harbour visitor trade and the hill farms up the Nantlle and Gwyrfai valleys, and a great deal of irreplaceable work ends up on one drive. The Bristol lab is a long way south — you would take the A55 the length of the coast to the border, then head down — and the town has no mainline station of its own, which is why posting it tracked is the sensible route. The first look is free.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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What tends to fail in Caernarfon.
Not listed here? Try the triage →| What shows up | Why it lands here | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| A solicitor's laptop that will not get past a black screen | Live case files, saved to the laptop and copied nowhere else | Take the drive out and post that; the laptop can stay |
| An edit-suite backup drive that has started to tick | A Welsh-language commission sits on it, with no second copy before delivery | Power it down now; every second it ticks is doing harm |
| A guest house booking PC that flags its disk at every start-up | The warning is clicked away all season, until the disk stops mounting | Copy it now, while it reads |
| A four-bay NAS in a land agent's office that has dropped a disk | Every survey, plan and client ledger the practice holds is on that one box | Number the bays, lift the disks out, and post the bare drives |
| A harbour-yard recorder holding the clip an insurer has asked for | The unit loops, writing over the very footage that is wanted | Switch it off at the wall, remove the disk, and send that on its own |
What to know when you post from Caernarfon.
Four questions we hear from Caernarfon.
Do you cover Caernarfon, and the valleys behind the town?
Yes. Caernarfon and out across LL54 and LL55 — the Nantlle and Gwyrfai valleys, the Menai shore, the farms on the higher ground — send us drives most weeks. The distance south makes no difference to how fast a drive is seen: post it tracked, the first look is done the morning it arrives, and we pay the leg home.
How long does a drive from Caernarfon take?
Post it tracked and a drive from Caernarfon usually reaches the bench a working day after you send it, with the written figure close behind. Once you accept it, most logical faults are back within two working days. A seized head, or a set of disks needing a rebuild, runs longer — and we say which yours is at the start, not after the work is under way.
Our edit suite lost a RAID mid-edit. Can the rushes be read back?
Usually. A single failed disk does not mean the rushes are lost. Turn the box off and stop it rebuilding — the moment the controller writes back onto a failing member, a set still worth recovering can tip over. Mark the bay order, ease the disks out, and send them bare; each is imaged first, and nothing is rebuilt on the originals.
Where in Caernarfon can I hand a drive in?
No. Caernarfon has no drop-off point, and the Cardiff office handles correspondence alone. Address it to the Bristol lab, tracked and insured — from this corner of the north-west that is the practical route. Prefer to bring it in? The lab receives hand-delivered drives on weekdays; phone ahead when the item is hard to box.
Pages people often read next.
Post it from Caernarfon; the work begins the day it arrives.
Do not switch it back on. Tell us what happened, and wait for the free diagnosis before agreeing to anything.