Hard drive recovery: DriveSavers saves the day!

A follow-up to our report of our recent hard drive failure:

As you may recall, we sent our hard drive to DriveSavers for data recovery. They were nothing short of amazing. They confirmed that the drive was dead as the proverbial doornail. Even their standard methods of recovering data from such drives did not work. The drive head would simply not move forward to read the data. Still, they eventually found a method that could extract the data from the drive.

And they recovered all the data. The copied the files to 5 DVDs and sent them back to us. We had the DVDs in our hands less than a week from when we sent the drive to them. We state again: 100% of what had been on the drive was recovered. Just as important, we got a daily phone call throughout the week, informing us of the status of the recovery, which helped keep our anxiety level down.

A minor caveat: The DriveSavers people clearly knew that we were from MacFixIt. So it is possible that we were receiving some special treatment that other customers might not have received. But we doubt it. We know of other similarly satisfied customers over the years. We strongly suspect that our treatment was the rule, not the exception.

We never needed to avail ourselves of DriveSavers services before. And we hope we never do again. But it's great to know that DriveSavers is there if and when you do need them.

Mac OS X note We made no attempt to reinstall the recovered OS X software, as it almost assuredly would not have worked anyway. Instead, we reinstalled OS X from our original OS X 10.1 CD and then did online updates. However, we were able to copy almost all the third-party software and personal files from the DVDs to our new Home directory or to the Applications folder without any hassle. No permissions problems, no copy problems. It all just worked. Even Preferences files from our Home Library folder copied and worked successfully. A few programs needed to be re-installed, but only very few. Given all the reported potential problems of backing up data in Mac OS X, this went much smoother than we had anticipated.