Thursday, August 10, 2006
Novato Company saves information from celeb's hard drives
The company recovers data lost during power surges, earthquakes, fires, floods and other disasters, including ordeals undergone by laptops that have been drowned, dropped, crushed and burned. The firm's recovery rate is around 95 percent.
DriveSavers has a reputation for recovering data that other companies have deemed hopelessly unrecoverable, including one company's accounting records that had been lost in a fire that welded the monitor to the hard disk's outer shell.
In addition to hardware problems such as drives with stiction, bad actuators, damaged motors, controllers or control tracks, DriveSavers deals with software problems such as corruption to directories caused by conflicting software, power surges or other electrical problems and customer errors.
Over its 11-year history, the company has developed proprietary procedures such as creation of customized software applications to combat specific recovery challenges. Company engineers also have worked directly with drive companies to create data recovery techniques for specific problems with specific drives.
In cases of mechanical problems that cannot be cured externally, work is performed in a special clean room to prevent dust particles from falling onto hardware components and gouging the data stored there. The data can then be recovered by reprogramming the media's structure. Because of this procedure, most manufacturers honor warranties on drives that have been recovered by DriveSavers.
DriveSavers customers include major companies like Adobe Systems, American Express, Arthur Andersen & Co., Ben and Jerry's, Eastman Kodak, MGM, Motorola and Xerox Corp. as well as celebrities like "The Simpsons" cartoon characters, Barbara Mandrell, Sting and Isaac Hayes.
DriveSavers can recover data from any size desktop or laptop workstation and all standard operating systems including Macintosh, DOS, Windows, WinNT, Novell and UNIX. The basic estimate for a 24- to 48-hour turnaround ranges from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, depending on the size of the media and the degree of difficulty. Customers who do not require immediate turnaround receive discounts of up to 40%.
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