Under the Great Orme · Llandudno
Llandudno data recovery. A guest house's season of bookings on one PC.
Llandudno is a community of 19,700 people at the 2021 census, spread across the Creuddyn peninsula between the Great Orme and the Little Orme. It was built in the Victorian age as a seaside resort and is still run as one — the Mostyn Estate laid the town out and remains its major landowner. The work here is hospitality: hotels and guest houses along the Promenade, the day-visitor trade to the Great Orme with its tramway and cable car, the events calendar at Venue Cymru, and the photographers who work the two shores. What fails is what the season rests on — a booking database, a card terminal, a CCTV disk, a card full of a wedding shoot — and the failure that hurts most lands in spring, when a dead office PC takes the reservations with it before the first guest arrives. Nothing is collected and nothing is handed over — not here, not in Cardiff; a drive is posted, insured and tracked, out east along the A55 to our Bristol lab. The first look costs nothing.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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What fails around Llandudno.
Not listed here? Try the triage →| What shows up | Why it lands here | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| A guest-house booking PC dead before the season | A whole season of reservations and card records on one machine | Send it over, and tell us when the first guests are due |
| A photographer's studio RAID that will not mount | Weddings and portraits shot off the Orme and the two shores, held on a two-disk box | Send the disks bare and numbered in bay order, not the box |
| A seafront CCTV recorder that has stopped writing | One disc overwritten every day of the season, until the reads fail | Take the drive out of the recorder and leave it switched off |
| A drive left over winter in a cold seafront store | Salt air gets to the board months before the fault shows | Leave it be; drying it at home only spreads the corrosion |
| A retiree's external drive of family photos, now clicking | A lifetime of pictures on one disk, with no second copy | Unplug it now; each restart of a clicking drive risks more |
What is different about Llandudno.
Questions from LL30 postcodes.
Do you cover the Great Orme, Penrhyn Bay and Craigside too?
Yes — the whole Creuddyn peninsula, from the West Shore round to Penrhyn Bay, Penrhynside and Craigside, and down to Llandudno Junction. Only the drive travels, so any LL30 address is the same distance from the bench, and a weekday posting usually arrives the following morning.
A guest house's booking system has failed just before the season. Can it be recovered?
Usually, yes. The reservations, the card takings and the guest history live on a plain office PC or its disk, and those give out in plain ways — heat, long summers, a tired drive. Flag the bookings as your priority and they come off the disk before the rest.
The drive spent the winter in a cold seafront store. Does that matter?
Say so when you book it in. Sea air and condensation reach the board well before any fault is visible, and kitchen-cupboard fixes only deepen the harm — no switching it on and off, no hairdryer, no rice, no airing cupboard. The less that has been tried, the more comes back.
Is there anywhere in Llandudno to hand a drive in?
No. There is no walk-in point in Llandudno, nor at the Cardiff office. It all runs through the Bristol intake lab, so send it insured and tracked, or carry it to the lab door yourself on a weekday. The look-over costs nothing, and we pay for the return.
Pages people often read next.
Post it from Llandudno; we open it the day it lands.
Do not switch it back on. Tell us what happened, and wait for the free diagnosis before agreeing to anything.