There is never a good time for a computer crash, but it was particularly horrifying for the Digital Journal.
The Toronto-based small business had just stopped publishing a quarterly magazine about digital culture to throw all its resources into its citizen-journalism website when its backup crashed. Digital Journal had bought its own state-of-the-art server. It installed extensive backup.
What could possibly go wrong?
In a short time, the main drive and the secondary drive both failed. Worse, the backup process continued, overwriting two other backup drives with the errors of the first two backup drives.
The odds against two drives failing simultaneously are astronomical. But it happened. Digital Journal editor Chris Hogg had no choice but to dig deep into the company's pockets, and go to a data-recovery specialist.
“You don't know how valuable your data is until you've lost it,” he says.
CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc., a Markham, Ont.-based company, has calmed many panicked people like Mr. Hogg. CBL had all of Digital Journal's software and data back up and running within four days.
It was one of many routine rescues for CBL since 1993, when William Margeson and Zhengong Chang co-founded the company.
CBL has a rogue's gallery of dead drives, and pride of place goes to one fire-damaged unit that looked like a forgotten pot roast. But the platters inside the sealed drive were fine. They were taken out in a “clean room,” remounted with a new motor and head (the part that reads the data), and sent to technicians who located and rescued the data on it with their own software.
In Mr. Hogg's case, the recovery was total. When his drives were fixed, the system picked up exactly where it had left off four days earlier. Still, Digital Journal had suffered an unexpected four-day holiday.
“Hard drives are becoming more reliable these days,” said Tim Margeson, son of the co-founder and CBL's general manager, “but there are more drives in play. Five years ago, manufacturers shipped 200 million drives a year. Now, it's 400 million.”
Matthew Kanas, who works in the Toronto offices of Maverick Public Relations, experienced a similar problem, but for him it was personal. He bought an external backup system made by a California company that makes enclosures for hard drives and sells them as backup units. Mr. Kanas bought his at a major retail outlet, and used it to back up five years of collected photos, music and documents.
He checked the drive, and the backup had been successful, so he proceeded to reformat his computer's hard drive. But when he went to recover his 10,000 photos, the drive emitted a clicking noise. Clicking always means a disaster.
He says the California company did not respond to his phone calls and e-mails for weeks. The company did not make the drive, just the enclosure.
Weeks passed. Eventually, the company responded, telling Mr. Kanas that the lost data is his problem, and they would replace the drive. But to do that, Mr. Kanas had to go through the retailer, which said he had waited too long, and the replacement period had expired.
He went to the Toronto offices of a U.S.-based company called Ontrack Data Recovery, which he chose because their rates were good and Ontrack operations manager John Riddell was nice on the phone. Mr. Kanas ended up paying $1,300 to recover the data. The final cost, taxes in, was about $2,000, not counting his original purchase price.
“What's the dollar value of photos?” he asked himself. “Do I love five years' worth of photos that much?”
Well, he does. And now he has his irreplaceable courtship pictures back.
