Can You Save a Hard Drive?
In the last episode of "As the Hard Drive Turns," our hero (that would be me) suffered a catastrophic equipment failure (that would be the hard drive on my Dell PC). Most of it was in the My Documents folder that I regularly backed up, but two important elements (my Outlook mail and my speech-recognition voice files) were stored in some buried folder somewhere.
This event, I realized, provided an opportunity to review DriveSavers, a data-recovery company that boasts a 90 percent success rate at resurrecting files from dead drives. Last week, I reported that I'd sent them my drive--but I left you hanging concerning their success.
DriveSavers found severe damage in the physical platters of the hard drive. Despite two trips to the clean room and the rebuild of my hard drive from identical spare parts, DriveSavers batted only .500. They resurrected my voice files, complete and whole, but couldn't find my e-mail stash. They returned to me five DVD discs containing all of the rescued files. (They included several gigabytes of pictures, music, files and other stuff that I'd had backed up anyway.) Had I been a paying customer and not a reviewer, I would have been charged about $2,000.
(Non-rush jobs range from $500 to $2,700, depending on how much surgery DriveSavers must do. If they can't recover anything at all that's useful to you, you pay $200 for the wild goose chase. For Hurricane Katrina victims, the $200 fee is waived, and recovery services are one-third off.)
But for me, the most enlightening part of the whole experience turned out to be the phone conversations with Rian, the engineer who oversaw my case. Clearly, he's seen it all -- or, rather, heard it all, since the engineers confer with each customer by phone.
For starters, he's heard plenty of crying, both of joy and despair. DriveSavers even employs a full-time suicide counselor. Over the years, Rian says, he's had to cultivate a doctor-like ability to detach himself from emotional involvement with individual cases, as a survival mechanism.
Over the phone, he’s also overheard promotions and firings--one unhappy ex-employee was dragged right off the phone and out of the building--not to mention broken and saved marriages. A grateful ex-wife called to thank him for unearthing documents pertaining to her husband's infidelity, about which she'd known nothing.
When you spend your days looking over the corpses of people's data, you can't help drawing some conclusions about the hard drive as a storage mechanism. It's a fragile, moving part whose life is, in every case, finite. As I indicated last week, engineers like Rian become decidedly fatalistic about the death of hard drives ("It's not a matter of if, but when.").
Frankly, I'm envious of someone in Rian's position; I'd think it would be insanely fascinating to get the kinds of glimpses he gets of American lives. According to him, though, the novelty has long since worn off. Nowadays, to him, data is just data; even the gigabytes of pornography and file-swapped music files that he finds "all the time" don't even raise an eyebrow. (Child pornography, however, gets turned over to the authorities.)
My tale triggered an absolutely huge volume of e-mail and postings to the Pogue feedback board. Most of you wanted suggestions for backup systems so that you won't have to go through what I went through. I'll dedicate next week's column to this topic. But steel yourself for this much: In backup systems, you can choose only two out of these three: easy, cheap and fast.