Free Data Recovery of Wet Phones and Hard Drives for Hurricane Harvey Victims

I've called upon Drive Savers before, when an employer's RAID 5+1 drive lost two disks in one afternoon, the second halfway through a rebuild—and then the proprietary, ancient RAID controller board died before we got somebody onsite. Unfortunately, all the RAID configuration was stored in the dead board and the data layout on disk was proprietary.

We ended up paying about $7,000 to Drive Savers and they managed to recover all my employer's data. Drive Savers is definitely a class act.

So this offer is a big deal: This isn't some fly-by-night company just trying to market their services. This is a very high-end recovery operation which normally costs a lot of money.

This is certainly an awesome and generous gesture and Drive Savers wholly deserves all the attention they get here. (No sarcasm!)

Meanwhile, this is the donation page of Save the Children for the victims of the South Asia Floods:

https://secure.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.95...

Clicking on this link is probably not much harder than clicking the upvote button on this story.

As a former (and future, should the need arise) customer of Drive Savers, I can attest to their remarkable abilities and standout service. I've met reps from the company at a few trade shows and when I told one that my (then) employer sent them lots of business, I was introduced to several of their techs. Even when I wasn't playing the role of 'paying customer', everyone was extremely friendly.

Even still, this is a surprisingly generous offer. Good PR for them, obviously, but right in line with the encounters that I've had in the past.

Trivia: DS successfully recovered a full episode of the Simpsons. This was relayed to me at a trade show.

I was watching the news and and a woman was recounting how her family escaped the flood, and in particular the things she wished that she had done differently. One of the things which struck me was that she hadn't considered the effect of the water on her phones which she and her family put into their pockets. The phones of course they were dead when they arrived at the shelter. I'm guessing this was a pretty common experience, and without something like this free service coming along I have to assume that they would just be writing them off and be focused on rebuilding/relocating. This is a really amazing thing to offer people are absolutely devastated, good PR, but also just good behavior.

In particular for those people who lost everything, it might be that some of the only photos they have are on those phones.

A great service to the victims of Hurricane Harvey and also a great marketing opportunity. It seems like everyone wins in this situation (well, except DriveDavers' competitors), and that's not common.

Having used them in the past for a water-damaged hard drive I'd say a good portion of those people will get their data back.

As an IT person who's ended up having to use Drive Savers a number of times (don't ask), I can speak to their great service. They're a standout in an industry of nickel & dimers.

I'm in Australia so this question isn't for me, but it might be relevant for anybody slightly closer.

Could/should people who want to volunteer contact this company and offer their time? Are there things people with limited expertise in data recovery could assist with?

It's certainly obvious that quite a few areas in data recovery - like relocating disk platters, Flash/SSD chip resoldering, etc - need a clean room, hands that are proven steady, and a good handle on what can go wrong and how to deal with it. This can't be taught in a day.

Waterlogged media probably means tons of controller board replacements. That's not a completely unskilled job either, and one I would be cautious about helping out with.

When I think of waterlogged phones I immediately go worst-case-scenario and think of Flash chip desoldering because PCB + battery + water == disaster. Nope. I don't have the skill for that!

It's (unfortunately) also quite possible that water-damaged media has also been impacted due to the rough-and-tumble of rescue efforts as well.

Then I think about the software side. Manufacturer and/or in-house recovery tooling that operates at such a low level (on the same order as BIOS updates etc) is likely going to require attention to detail and high awareness (and knowledge of what a proper run looks like) to get an intuitive sense that something's working or not. Then there are probably "this tool never existed" NDA things on top of that.

My main consideration is reputation. It's cases like these where a 32-year reputation is cemented even further - or blown out the door if dozens of failures are reported at once.

Now I've just thought of all this I feel like I've answered my own question in the firm negative - but I'll ask anyway, since others (particularly those near one of the ~18 (!) drop-off locations - https://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/contact-drivesavers/) may benefit from knowing "no, definitely not useful" or "yes, these jobs are very hard to get wrong if you know the basics".

This is definitely a great gesture, and will probably require a lot of labor on their part. I wonder why they did not restrict it to households with income below a certain level? That way they would have received both the positive publicity as well as reduced the free labor they need to provide.

Off topic, I am wondering what will happen to drivesavers business model given mechanical hard drives are on the way out.

Seen as a market mechanism, it is really weird that when a service is most needed, it becomes free.