Free to Fire Victims: Data Retrieval Help
A Northern California company is offering free computer data retrieval help to victims of Southern California’s recent fires, including the Orange County blaze that destroyed 10 houses in Lemon Heights.
Victims whose computers were damaged in the fires might still be able to salvage data stored on the computer’s hard drive, said Scott Gaidano, president of DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc., an 11-year-old company based in Novato. “The exterior can look totally carbonized, and the case can break like a potato chip,” Gaidano said. “But that does not mean we cannot get the data back.”
Gaidano said the firm made similar offers to victims of the fires in Oakland several years ago and has an 80% success rate with fire-damaged machines. Plastic monitors often melt “like taffy” Gaidano said, but the main computer is encased in metal, and the hard drive is inside still another box that “can take up to 3,000 degrees before the platters get damaged.”
Victims do have to pay to ship the PC to DriveSavers’ offices, and will also have to supply or pay for a CD-ROM or other storage medium that can be used to store the retrieved data. For more information, call the company at (800) 440-1904. To see pictures of some of the damaged computers the company has worked on, check out the company’s Web site at https://www.drivesavers.com
Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at greg.miller@latimes.com.
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