The studio took years to clear out. I made disk images of the half-dozen computers, which were subsequently dismantled. Then, this fall, my mother found two hard drives we’d overlooked, which could have been either mine or his. Both failed to register when I plugged them into my computer; one made an ominous grinding noise. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to let them go.
For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers. It’s a half hour from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the balmy, scenic suburb of Novato. The boxy, low-rise office overlooks a verdant wetland frequented by otters and egrets. Visiting in January, I felt that I’d arrived in hard-disk heaven.
I was greeted by Sarah Farrell and Mike Cobb, two directors of the company. Farrell, a teacherly woman with blond hair and a beekeeping hobby, oversees business development but used to be an engineer. “In the lab, I just assume everything has been in the toilet,” she told me. “During COVID, I can’t even tell you what people spilled on their MacBooks.” Cobb, who runs engineering, is a genial man with lively blue eyes, and once saved a computer tower from a burrowing squirrel: “He peed right on the power supply.” Cutesy anecdotes alternated with triumphs and tragedies—a school district rescued from a ransomware gang, an iPad salvaged from a plane crash. “They made me too sad,” Farrell said of the worst cases. “I had to be, like, ‘Symptoms, no story,’ or I’d never be able to go home.”
Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”
DriveSavers receives some twenty thousand inquiries each month. It has saved data for government agencies, multinational corporations, and more than a few celebrities, whose autographed portraits beamed from the lobby walls. Sidney Poitier recovered a draft of his memoir through the company’s good offices; Khloé Kardashian, a phone that fell into a pool. Data loss has been the digital age’s great equalizer: What else could bring together such disparate figures as Willie Nelson, Buzz Aldrin, Gonzo the Muppet, and Gerald Ford?
The memorabilia dated back to the eighties. Back then, hard drives stored so little and cost so much that they were generally more valuable than the files they contained; one forty-megabyte drive on display in the lobby originally retailed for twenty thousand dollars. Advances in storage density, and the digitization of everything from filing taxes to laying out magazines, changed this calculus. “It was like two crossing lines,” Jay Hagan, who co-founded DriveSavers, later told me. “The cost of drives was going down, and the value of data was going up.”
Fittingly, the company emerged from the crash of a hard-drive manufacturer, Jasmine Technologies, where Hagan met his co-founder, Scott Gaidano. In 1989, they established DriveSavers as a repair service for their former employer’s abandoned customers, whom they quickly realized were more concerned about their files than their hardware. “I came up with this theorem,” Steve Burgess, a data- recovery pioneer who sold his own company to the duo, told me. “The value of a person’s data is negatively correlated with whether or not they have it. Once they have it, it really wasn’t worth anything. But, if they don’t have it, it’s worth an arm and a leg and their children.”