A recovery mission of a different kind

Bob Sullivan Technology correspondent • Profile • E-mail

Sawyer Real Estate in Gulfport, Miss. was founded by Lenny Sawyer’s great grandfather in 1901. But when Katrina hit, it seemed most of that legacy would be wiped out. The firm’s office, which had been 200 feet from the beach, was devastated. Wind ripped the structure to pieces, and a storm surge left 6 feet of standing water on everything inside. The firm’s 14 critical computers lay somewhere under a pile of rubble.

Sawyer thought all his company’s critical electronic business records — contracts, tenant records, e-mail — were gone.

"I'm sitting in front of the building, and it looked like a war zone. ... There wasn't a wall left. Everything was in shambles," Sawyer said. "But in the back of my mind, I remembered reading an article about [data recovery], and I said, ‘It's probably worth us digging through the rubble to get to the hard drives.’"

The computers were a mess.  Many were not only wet, but packed with sand, seaweed, and even seashells.

But Sawyer's instincts were right — digging out the hard drives was worth it.  While the computers are damaged beyond repair, much of the firm's data has been saved.

While electronics are incredibly fragile, and usually wither in the presence of water, the data stored magnetically on computer hard drives can be incredibly resilient, experts say. And as Katrina survivors return home to pick through the rubble, the possibility of recovering their digital memories may offer some a ray of hope.

Recovery isn't cheap
Sawyer turned his hard drives over to data recovery experts from the firm Kroll OnTrack, Inc. Working in "clean rooms," they are carefully removing the disk-shaped platters inside. After bathing them in cleaning solvents or blowing them dry with air, they then piece together the 1s and 0s of Sawyer’s livelihood. So far, they've retrieved 100 percent of the data from several of the drives.

Lenny Sawyer Sawyer said his computers were full of water, dirt, sand -- and even seashells.

Such restorations are often possible, say experts, but they aren’t cheap. It costs about $1,000 per hard drive to reconstruct data from damaged computers.

That might seem like a steep price for a home user, and it’s probably more than the computer cost. But the digital age has made the PC the sole repository of everything from entire music collections to family photo albums. For irreplaceable family photos, that might be $1,000 worth spending.

“For home users it comes down to the value of their data, digital pictures, finances, music collection, hobbies, whatever they have on their computer,” said OnTrack spokesman Jeff Faust.

“In many cases the cost of recovery is well worth the alternative of time, effort, and cost of rebuilding all their files from scratch. In some cases it’s not possible to re-create their lost data; [that's] especially true for digital photos.”

But even in a seemingly hopeless scenario, such as a fully-submerged computer, there is hope. 

"There is always a chance," said OnTrack vice president Todd Johnson. "Don't assume your data is gone."

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