SG12, the maltings and the Lee Navigation · Ware
Ware data recovery. The New River begins here, and still supplies London.
Ware sits east of Hertford on the Lea, canalised through the town as the Lee Navigation, where the A10 and the A414 cross and a bypass has taken through traffic since 17 January 1979. The 2021 census counted 19,627 people in the civil parish. Two things set the town apart. The New River, opened on 29 September 1613 and drawn from Chadwell and Amwell Springs, still carries about 8% of London's water for Thames Water. And GSK's site is the main employer, making Ellipta respiratory inhalers; in July 2026 the company said it would upgrade its laboratories here. The firms that ring us sit around all of that: calibration engineers and validation consultants with documentation packs on one laptop, studios and small practices in the converted maltings sharing a two-disk NAS, boatyards on the Navigation keeping hull surveys on a machine that lives in a damp office. Post whatever has failed to the Oxford lab, insured and tracked, and the first look is free.
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The five we see most from Ware.
No page for your town? Try the fault-finder →| The problem | Why we see it locally | First move |
|---|---|---|
| A supplier's laptop holding validation packs, dead on the desk | Firms serving the pharmaceutical site keep test records and signed drawings on one machine | Leave it off; the disk travels bare or still inside the laptop |
| A two-disk NAS in a converted maltings office | Studios and small practices mirror onto two disks and treat that as the backup | Shut it down before it starts rebuilding onto a spare |
| An external drive of restoration photographs that has begun to click | The gazebos and the riverside buildings are photographed by people with one copy | Unplug it at the first click and stop copying |
| A marine engineer's laptop that took a knock on the Lee Navigation | Hull surveys and job records travel between the boatyards and a damp office | Do not try to boot it again — a knock means bench work |
| A print and packaging firm's RAID box that will not bring its array back up | Artwork, plates and every live job file sit on the one set of disks | Take the disks out, number each with its bay, send the set |
After the parcel leaves Ware.
Neighbouring Ware.
The complete town list →Asked most often in Ware.
Is there a counter in Ware I can hand a drive to?
No. Nothing changes hands in person here: we keep no counter in the town, run no van and collect from nowhere. Drives arrive as insured, tracked parcels and go home the same way, that leg at our cost. Anyone who would rather not post a drive at all can use the Oxford intake lab, which is open on weekdays, 9am–5:30pm. Either route, the free diagnosis begins the day your parcel is opened.
Which parts of Ware and SG12 do you take work from?
All of SG12: the town centre and the high street, the converted maltings, the offices and yards along the Lee Navigation, and the lanes out past Chadwell and Amwell Springs. Hertford is the next town west and shares the branch line; Stevenage sits up the A602. Everything moves as a tracked parcel, so an SG12 postcode is on the same footing as any other address.
A laptop with our calibration and validation records will not power up, and an audit is booked.
Send the laptop or the disk on its own — both are fine, and either falls in the £300 + VAT band. Do not let anyone run a repair install or a disk check first: those rewrite the very structures we read to find your documentation packs, test records and signed-off drawings. Power it down, tell us the audit date when you ring, and the job is worked to it. Everything starts with a read-only image, so the original is never the thing we alter.
An external drive holding years of photographs of the gazebos has started clicking. Is that recoverable?
Often, yes — but only if it is unplugged now. Clicking means the heads are not reading properly, and every further attempt to copy files off costs you passes over the surface that a set of photographs may not survive. Leave it switched off, send it in its own case, and let the free diagnosis say what state the platters are in. Heritage and local-history archives come to us this way constantly, usually as the only digital copy anyone kept.
Other jobs from the casebook.
One tracked parcel out of Ware, and we start.
Power it down, tell us what went wrong, and let the free diagnosis land before you decide anything.