DriveSavers Sees Return on Data from the Great Beyond

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By Matt Hines

NOVATO, Calif. — The lobby at DriveSavers serves as a miniature shrine to the sheer misfortune and pure stupidity suffered by those among us who have attempted to own computers.

In the foyer at DriveSavers headquarters here, you'll find a statue of KFC's Col. Harland Sanders, signed pictures of celebrities including Adam Sandler, Keith Richards, and Ben & Jerry. And along with the other famous faces of the company's customers hanging all over its walls and stairways, you find a collection of crumpled bits of tortured plastic that used to be some of these people's laptop computers and hard drives.

Since its founding in the pre-Cambrian era of information technology that was 1985, DriveSavers has promised to help businesses and individual customers regain information stored on devices that have been infected, burnt or otherwise mangled. All these years later, a visit to the company's offices finds the firm preparing for growth and betting that now, more-than-ever, people are willing to pay to get their data back.

"We're seeing a lot of multi-array RAID systems, that's been one of the fastest growing areas of our business over the last five years," said Michael Hall, director of PC engineering and chief security officer at DriveSavers. "We have a lot of banks and financial services companies as customers; our business is historically founded on people who don't know exactly what information is on the affected device they send us, but they know there's a very good chance there's something on there they really need."

DriveSavers services don't come cheaply, starting at $500 to $2700 to inspect and recover a typical PC hard drive, and heading further upwards based on the volume of memory a customer is asking the company to test and remediate.

So while DriveSavers' most famous rescues revolve around mashed or virus-ridden laptops—such as the one it handled belonging to Bill Oakley, executive producer of Fox Networks' "The Simpsons," which held scripts for twelve yet-to-be-produced episodes of the longtime hit, including a season finale—its growth is being fueled largely by corporate mishaps.

Potential customers could easily avoid the need to acquire the company's services if they simply employed remote back-up storage technologies, points out Scott Gaidano, the 62-year-old president and co-founder of DriveSavers, as he highlights some of his more colorful customer stories.

But if it were really that easy, then there would be no company museum, he said, as his workers busily fielded customers' phone calls in the background.

eweek