I Lost the Cure for the Common Cold!

By Daniel R. Matlis 

It’s 3:00 AM and your newborn baby wakes up crying. You want to go back to sleep, but his circadian rhythm is set for Beijing, not Philadelphia, and he is wide awake.So you get a cup of coffee, turn on your laptop and start to do some work. In a moment of inspiration, you discover the cure for the common cold. It’s all there on the screen right in front of your eyes and then your baby kicks, the coffee spills on your laptop and, just like that, the cure is gone. Who do you call?

Monday, at the Corporate Computing Show in NY, I met the people for the job. DriveSavers Data Recovery is a company that recovers data from crashed and damaged media. They have been doing this for over 20 years and when James Bond looses the data in his laptop he doesn’t call Q. Instead he deals with Kelly Chessen, Data Crisis Counselor DriveSavers (Yes, Sean Connery is a client).

With the prospect of irretrievable information loss, many of the callers with whom Chessen deals are as distraught. The emotional trauma associated with the loss of critical data can be disruptive both at work and at home.

Chessen came to DriveSavers with a background in psychology that serves her well in her dealings with often-frantic customers. She worked with a suicide prevention hotline for more than five years, including one year as the manager and trainer. This is exactly the kind of training I want the person on the other end of the line to have under these circumstances.

In addition to the soft skills, DriveSavers has technical skills and facilities to back them up. They have recovered data from drives that have been damaged, dropped, deleted, burnt, crushed and drowned in the Amazon River. The company has a success rate of over 90%, and recovers data in as little as 24 hours from all operating systems and storage media including hard drives, disk arrays, floppies, CD-ROM, DVD, removable cartridges and digital camera media. They have they own calls 100 clean room, and if they work on your drive, the manufacturer’s warranty is still good, although I’m not sure that a drive full of Amazon River water is covered.

So the next time your husband, wife, son, daughter, dog, cat or self spill a cup of coffee on your laptop containing the cure for the common cold, or the therapeutic area you are working on, don’t sweat it, lay on the couch and call the Data Shrink.

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