SA14 and SA15 · Llanelli
Llanelli data recovery. Trostre still makes tinplate; the offices around it run on disks.
Llanelli is the largest town in Carmarthenshire — about 42,000 people at the 2021 census, and bigger than the county town at Carmarthen. It industrialised as Tinopolis, the centre of the world's tinplate trade, and Tata's Trostre works, opened in 1951 and employing around 700, is the only tinplate plant left in the UK. The work has spread well beyond the metal: quality and traceability records on a supplier's server at Dafen, CAD and CNC files on a workshop machine, edit-suite storage at a production company, membership and ticketing at Parc y Scarlets, and the drawings and progress photographs of the crews building Pentre Awel at Delta Lakes. A farm office up the Gwendraeth valley and a till system at Parc Trostre run on the same kind of single drive. When one of them stops, the parcel goes east along the M4 and takes the Prince of Wales Bridge over the Severn to the Bristol intake lab. Post it tracked, and we look at it for nothing.
Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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What breaks in a tinplate town.
Not listed here? Try the triage →| What shows up | Why it lands here | Do this now |
|---|---|---|
| A NAS on a Dafen shop floor that has stopped mounting | The CAD, the CNC programs and the quality records live on it, not the network | Power it down, mark each disk with its bay, and send them bare |
| The one PC in a town-centre office that failed over a weekend | A small practice will keep the same machine running long past its years | Leave the hardware to your IT; the data side is ours |
| An external drive holding a whole video and photo archive | It is the only copy anyone made, and it travels between shoots | Stop using it now; more of these reach us than anything |
| A two-disk mirror at a Parc Trostre shop, now down to one | The first disk dropped out weeks back and the warning went unseen | Send both; we image each one before attempting a rebuild |
| A laptop that took a knock on a Delta Lakes site and now clicks | Kit carried around a building site all week gets dropped and stood on | Power it off and keep it that way; restarting only makes things worse |
What is different about Llanelli.
Four questions from SA14 and SA15.
Do you cover Llanelli and the villages around it?
Yes — all of SA14 and SA15, from the town centre out to Llwynhendy, Bynea, Dafen and Felinfoel, down to Machynys and the coast, and up into the Gwendraeth valley. Burry Port and Pembrey next door are handled on the same terms, and so is the wider Carmarthenshire country behind the town.
Our quality and traceability records sit on a server that has failed. Can they come back intact?
Usually. The server is imaged read-only before anything is read from it, so the originals stay untouched and the dates and times hold. A fixed figure is put to you in writing beforehand, and at the end a checked list of exactly what came back — the record a customer audit will ask to see.
Our NAS began to rebuild itself and then froze. Should we take the power off it?
Yes, cut the power. A rebuild reads every sector from the disks that remain, which is the hardest work you can give a disk that is already tired, so a stalled rebuild often ends worse than where it started. Slide each disk out, write its bay on it, and post them bare — Bristol has no need of the enclosure.
Is there anywhere in Llanelli to hand a drive over?
No — Llanelli has no counter, and Cardiff none either; the Cardiff office only receives post. Send the drive to the Bristol intake lab by tracked, insured post. The lab also accepts drop-offs in person on weekdays, should that suit. When it is bulky, call first and we can agree the packing.
Pages people often read next.
Post it from Llanelli; we start work the day it lands.
Do not switch it back on. Tell us what happened, and wait for the free diagnosis before agreeing to anything.