HU19, Holderness · Withernsea
Data recovery in Withernsea. One road in, no railway; the parcel makes the trip, not you.
Withernsea sits out on the Holderness coast, 5,766 people at the 2021 census, at the end of the A1033 — the one road in, running west through Patrington and Salt End into Hull, with no railway since the branch line closed in 1964. The lighthouse everyone pictures stands well inland, up Hull Road, and has been a museum since it was decommissioned in 1976. Tourism carries the town: the promenade and its amusement arcades, Valley Gardens, and static parks such as Withernsea Sands and Sand le Mere over at Tunstall, whose offices run a whole season of bookings and takings on one machine. Inland it is Holderness farming — accounts, subsidy claims and grain contracts on a tower in an outbuilding at Patrington, Keyingham or Roos. When one of those drives stops, or the museum's scanned archive will not open, the media comes to us by post. Send it insured; the assessment is free.
An engineer will take the details
0800 6890668
What tends to come in off the Holderness coast.
Nothing similar? Go to the triage →| What you see | Why it comes to us | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| A local-history drive from the lighthouse museum | Scanned archives, oral-history recordings and photographs, kept in one place only | Stop writing to it, leave it powered off, and send it in |
| A caravan-park office machine dead in the school holidays | The season's bookings, owner ledgers and card takings on the one box | Power it down at the socket; post the drive, not the tower |
| A promenade arcade's CCTV recorder, no longer writing | The single disk is overwritten night after night until it fails | Lift the disk from the recorder and stop it recording |
| A farm-office tower out at Patrington or Roos | Farm accounts, subsidy claims and grain contracts on the one drive | Leave it switched off; if it has been damp, say where it stood |
| A builder's laptop that lived in the van, now dead | Quotes, site photographs and invoices, copied to a single USB stick and no further | Stop using both, bag them together, and post them to us |
Getting a Withernsea drive to the lab.
What Withernsea people ask.
Do you cover the Holderness villages as well as Withernsea?
Yes. HU19 takes in Hollym, Holmpton, Rimswell and Waxholme, and farm jobs reach us from Patrington, Keyingham and Roos just as easily. Because it all moves by post, an address out in the villages is no further from the bench than one on the High Street. Send it tracked and insured; the diagnosis is free and we pay the parcel home.
Our caravan-park office machine has died mid-season. Can the bookings come back?
Usually, yes. A park office keeps the season's bookings, owner ledgers and card takings on the one machine, and that is the sort of drive we copy first and then work from the copy. Switch it off at the wall, let nobody reinstall or 'repair' it, and post the drive to us. Tell us which files the summer turns on and those are pulled first.
The farm PC has stood in a damp outbuilding. Does that ruin it?
Not on its own, but say so when you book it in. Damp works into a board long before the outside shows it, and the quick fixes — warming it through, standing it in rice — only add to the harm. Leave it switched off, do not dry it, seal it in a bag, and note where it has been sitting. One left wet and untouched gives us the most to work with.
Is there anywhere in Withernsea I can hand it in?
No — there is no counter in Withernsea, and none in Hull either. It travels by tracked, insured post, or you can bring it to the intake lab in Leeds on a weekday: the A1033 into Hull, then the A63 west to the M62. No bridge and no toll on the way. The look costs nothing and the way back is on us.
What people read after this.
Post it from Withernsea; the bench starts when it lands.
Leave it switched off. Tell us what happened. Nothing gets agreed before the free diagnosis has said what it is.