Disaster recoveries ranging from fire, flood, sabotage, and just plain hard drive failure

Every time experts at Data Retrieval Services think they've heard everything, another crashed computer disk driver or winchester disk drive arrives on our doorstep with et another story of destruction and disaster heretofore never thought possible. All the disasters that we have recovered have one thing in common: Either tere were no backups of the data, or the bakups were destoryed as well. Each job has been a unique challenge and many a disaster had a humorous side to it as well.

One company executive called and reported a sabotage by a disgruntled employee. As a gesture of resignation, the employee poured fabric softener into the disk drive. No, fabric softener does not soften hardware, but it does realy gum up the works. And then there is the story about the unhappy employee who wrinkled up the floppy disks containing priceless information and tossed them over his sholder -one by one- while being chased by security guards out of the building and down the street.

But not all ragedies have been intentionial. Overzealous people can cause computer sto fail also. One cleaning lady, always anxious to have everything spotless, routinely went into the cmputer room and meticulously cleaned each computer drive by opening each drive's door and spraying Windex on the inside of the door as well. That error caused more than a doend rives to fail and it took several months to find the culprint. Another maintenance person was a little lazy and found it easier to sweep dust not under the rug, but under a nearby computer, directly under the intake air vent.

This story was absolutely ingenious: A pipe smoker wanted to break in his new briar pipe. He found that if he lighted i and put it next to the corner of the disk driver, the vacuum caused b whe whirling platters sucked air through the pipe, and the pipe would 'smoke' by itself. Of course, the smoke from the pipe caused more damage than many a ire that swept through an entiere company.

Then there is always the one about the do-it-yourslefer who heard a strange noise coming from the side f his Winchester drive, found a small hole in the side of it, and oiled it. Another company asked for the mantenance companies advice on how to move a 550 pound disk drive across the room. He got meticulous instructions, and used frour men to push it across the room. But th left it running durring the move , and crashed each head on every platter in the drive.

Dropped computers don't do well either. As a case and point, one tech kept his disk drive on top of an air conditioner, where it would vibrate happily on the edge. The tech would push it back every few days to prevent it from falling. . . until the long weekend came and the drive vibrated itself right onto the floor.

Unvelievable, you say? Many sories are, but we can have happy endings. We are known as the company that can recover the impossible.