Crash and Burn? Some Firms Offer CPR

Most people don’t realize how much of their professional lives they’ve entrusted to a computer until their beloved machine crashes. Awareness of their vulnerability dawns at the moment they realize the sales report, multimedia file or customer database has gone and is probably never coming back.

“People display a wide range of emotion, from panic to guilt to anger to fear to terror,” said Nikki Strange, a data crisis counselor for DriveSavers, a Novato, Calif., firm that specializes in recovering data from crashed computer hard drives.

As workers and companies store more of their critical files electronically, they are increasingly vulnerable to computer viruses, power surges and human error that result in data loss.

“Someday, every drive will stop working due to simple mechanical failure,” said DriveSavers President Scott Gaidano. “It’s a physical device, and when it stops spinning . . . you have the potential for big problems.”

Once a problem occurs, people often make the situation worse by trying to fix it themselves.

The good news is that firms like DriveSavers can recover data from crashed hard drives about 90% of the time. Gaidano said his company has coaxed data from a computer that was submerged for two days in the Amazon River and from another machine that was burned beyond recognition.

When data loss results from a hardware failure, “our job is to breathe life back into the disk drive long enough to suck the data off,” said Stuart Hanley, director of engineering for Ontrack Data Recovery, a Minneapolis firm with an office in Los Angeles.

When data loss occurs because of a software failure, a data recovery specialist will try to rebuild the software program that runs the computer or reconstruct the specific files that were lost.

Most data loss cases that are severe enough to require professional attention can be repaired in one to three days, experts say. The price tag for a typical job is $600 to $1,200, said Hanley, who says his company has performed more than 30,000 data recoveries since it entered the business in 1988.

Even though data loss is sometimes beyond human control, computer users can reduce the risk by saving their files onto external disks and drives on a regular basis. Another option is to buy a software service that will automatically dial a high-security data storage facility off-site and send files via modem to a secure computer system. Surefind, for example, has storage facilities in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C. Prices start at about $995 a month for weekly automatic updates.