Data Recovery Saved the Day at my Wedding
When I was making plans for my wedding, I was thinking about caterers, a photographer, flowers, my dress, music and a honeymoon destination. I was not in any way, shape or form, thinking about hard drive data recovery companies. Unfortunately, sometimes reality (and its close friend, catastrophe) has a way of intruding on even the best laid plans. How would something that I previously associated with banks and maybe police investigations intrude on the most important day of my life, you ask? Picture the photographer having completed taking photos of the ceremony, then popping the memory card out of his camera to swap in a new one at the start of the reception, and dropping the first card into a pitcher of water. Without data recovery, I would have lost all of my wedding photos!
Before leaving for the honeymoon, I spent fifteen minutes online searching for ways to save photos stored on damaged memory cards. The name DriveSavers Data Recovery came up repeatedly as the recommended hard drive recovery solution, but I also noted the major camera manufacturers including Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fuji, Kodak and Olympus all refer their customers to DriveSavers for data recovery. That was good enough for me. I printed off the contact info and handed it to the photographer on my way to the limo. Turns out he already had a relationship with DriveSavers through his Professional Photographers of America (PPA) membership.
When we returned from our honeymoon, our photos were ready. All of them. The hard drive recovery technicians had worked their magic and the waterlogged memory card had yielded the ceremony photos. Being a naturally curious individual, I spent a few hours looking into the situation further and this is what I found. While it may be true that hard drive data recovery often gets the press (nothing gets the papers more excited than trying to extract incriminating data from a hard drive that’s been intentionally erased), DriveSavers has a long history in saving the day for consumers and professionals alike who’ve suffered an incident like the one at my wedding. It turns out there are several elements at play. First is the fact that electronics are inherently fragile. We take them for granted and sling them around, expose them to rain, drop them and generally take their continued operation for granted. The second issue is that these devices, whether they’re iPods, cameras, netbooks or even eBook readers all store data electronically. This means writing files to a hard disk, solid state drive or RAM card. And storage is the weak link, because all electronic storage will eventually fail. Memory cards have limited write cycles and hard drives wear out. Mind you, they’re designed to last a long time, but sometimes things happen (like dropping them in water) and then professional data recovery is your only option if you care about retrieving the data.
Lessons learned? Respect your electronics, back up your data and keep the contact info for DriveSavers handy.