Shopping Around DOESN'T Pay!

Price versus Value

Next time you are at Wal-Mart or any place that processes photographs, read their money-back guarantee. I assume you'll be infuriated to read that should they fail to develop your photos correctly and thereby ruin your pictures forever, they will only be liable up to the cost of a replacement roll of film. Imagine standing at the counter listening to someone coldly explain to you that, although your memories may be worth something to you, the plain fact is that the film itself is only worth a few dollars. They're absolutely right, and it's a perfectly logical argument. How would it make you feel?

As a man, I have to admit that we are especially guilty of being more like the person behind the counter than the customer with the lost pictures. When a hard drive fails, we look directly past the years of memories. Instead, we focus on the price of a new drive. In doing so, we are focused more on price than we are on value. Currently, as I write this blog post, a 500 gigabyte hard drive costs around $65 and can hold over 100,000 full-size digital photos. I am a father of two. I couldn't look my wife straight in the eye and tell her that those priceless pictures aren't worth more than $65!

Shopping for a "Good" Deal? Please Don't.

Picture this: You have just been in a serious car accident. You lie there, injured and bleeding, waiting for the paramedics to arrive and pull you from your car. As you're being placed in the ambulance, you gather all of your strength to utter three simple words, "Please Shop Around." Right?

No reasonable person would respond this way, but what would happen if you did? Let's imagine that you instruct the ambulance driver to whisk you around:

1. ... to your house so you can look up do-it-yourself cures on the Internet
   
2. ... then to your friend, who uses herbal remedies, incense, and other "amateur" medicines
3. ... then to a Dentist, who is a Doctor, but in a different field (a Doctor is a Doctor, right?)
   
4. ... then to your Family Practitioner, who is great, but isn't trained to handle trauma cases
5. ... then finally to a Hospital with trained Emergency Room Technicians
   

What are your chances of survival? You'd either be dead or irreparably damaged before making it to step 5. In each step, you've not only let too much time pass, but you've allowed yourself to be mishandled by well-meaning, yet incompetent individuals.

The list above is completely ridiculous. However, when it comes to their lost data - which equates to lost time, memories, or profits - people do this on a regular basis. Let's look through it step by step:

1. Do it yourself - Search YouTube and Google for DIY methods from complete strangers. Start downloading various software and choosing options you don't understand. Type weird commands into the computer when you have no idea what they do. Erase some data. Stick the hard drive in the freezer or bang on it (real suggestions!). Possibly damage it completely.
   
   
2. Take it to your friend, the computer geek. He hooks it up to his computer, which, not being forensically sound, (over)writes data on the disk. Spin the drive up again, possibly causing physical damage. (No offense to geeks - we're computer geeks, too! See #5.)
   
   
3. Bring it in to work and have your IT Department look at it. Your IT Department techs are trained to handle software problems, manage the mail system, and keep hackers out of your network - not repair hard drives. More overwrites, more spin-ups, more damage.
   
   
4. Walk in to the Big Box store and give your drive to the Nerd Platoon. They will charge you over $150 for an evaluation fee. They may be "A+" certified, but that certification is for Computer Repair, not Data Recovery. They simply don't have the training or equipment to do anything more than basic file undeleting. (Technicians who have that kind of knowledge don't work for the low wages paid by the big box stores.) When they can't recover your data, they might format (erase) it. Then they will be glad to help you purchase a new hard drive.
   
   
5. Bring your drive to Austin Data Rescue. Our techs are specifically trained to recover data. We do Computer Forensics - which is the art of finding data that isn't supposed to be there anymore, or that untrained users don't realize is there. We are specifically trained and certified for this work, and because it's all we do, we're very good at it. But there's a catch.
   
   We're the best in the industry, but even we can't fix something if it's been irreparably damaged. Hard drives are extremely fragile once damaged. The tiniest scratch in the wrong (right?) place can render the entire drive unrecoverable. Shopping your drive around, allowing others to (mis)handle it, dramatically increases the likelihood that more damage will occur. This virtually guarantees that your precious work, pictures or documents will be lost forever.
   

When you've experienced a data loss, go to an expert. Skip directly to step number 5. We'll get your data back!


Joshua Harper GCFE GCFA
Lead Technician
Austin Data Rescue
9600 Great Hills Trail Suite 150W
(512) 693-7668
josh@AustinDataRescue.com

Visit http://www.AustinDataRescue.com for service.

OMG - The House is ON FIRE!

WAKE UP!

It's 3 o'clock in the morning, and you are awakened by the high pitched shrieks of the fire alarm. The house is filling with smoke. This is the real thing - the house is on fire.

Once you ascertain that every living creature has made it to safety, you realize that you have one chance to grab something and bring it with you. The question is, "What would you grab?" For most people, the answer is something related to a box of keepsakes or family pictures.

A logical followup question is, "Why?" to which most people answer "Because everything else in the house can be replaced."

The scenario above isn't some stretched allegory to make a point. Most of us have asked ourselves those two questions at some point. My next question builds upon the principle of everything else being replaceable: "How much is your data worth?"

I'm afraid many of us fail to fully appreciate the value of those little 1's and 0's. My business clients generally understand this better - data lost = money lost. But for the personal clients I'm blessed to have the opportunity to help, it can take a little work reminding them of their data's value.


Personal Data Represents Time...
...and time cannot be replaced.

When a client has lost their personal data, there is generally a temporal element to the lost information. Either the data represents years of time spent working on work or on a project, or it represents years of memories. Neither one is replaceable. The time spent to create the data will never be re-invested, and the events, situations, and people will never be the same as they were when captured in a photograph. The value of the information is so high that it cannot be quantified - that's why we call it "invaluable."

Digital Pictures are Cheap...
...so they're actually worth more!

With the proliferation of digital media has come an explosion of digital content. The fact that we don't have to run down to the developer every 24 or 36 shots means we take a lot more pictures. Even if we don't own a camera, most phones have that functionality built in. In many ways, the ease of taking the pictures, and the sheer quantity of pictures taken, has lessened their value to us. However, I'd like to point you in a different direction.

Digging through your box of old photographs is a great way to look into the past. But what are you really seeing? If you're looking at photographs taken a few generations ago, you are likely seeing a posed, staged picture. I have a picture of my grandmother as a young girl. It's a black-and-white photo of her standing next to a fence. She is stiff-looking and composed, like many posed pictures. And it's the only one I've ever seen. For ordinary folks, photography was expensive and rare, so that is likely the only picture taken at that time.

Compare that image with the pictures we take these days where photography is cheap. I bet the pictures of your family and kids show them in action. There is a dynamic, active life to the photos. They show people not as they posed, but as they really lived! To me, this makes the pictures even more valuable.


More Information in One Place = More Memories to be Lost

Imagine someone having thousands of those dynamic, full-of-life pictures from your family's past, all contained in a magic box the size of a deck of cards. Now imagine that person throwing that box in the garbage. Sad, isn't it? Yet when people fear their data is lost, they simply toss it away, or refuse to pay someone to recover it.

Unlike your computer geek buddy, or the neighborhood computer shop, Austin Data Rescue is in the business of getting people's data back. We say this all the time: "That's what we do - that's all we do." For me personally, when someone brings their failing drives or devices into our shop, I have a vested interest in recovering the data. I consider it a privilege to be able to serve others in this way. That's why, for our Standard service, if we cannot recover your data, you will not be charged.

Joshua Harper GCFE GCFA
Lead Technician
Austin Data Rescue
9600 Great Hills Trail Suite 150W
(512) 693-7668
josh@AustinDataRescue.com

Visit http://www.AustinDataRescue.com for service.