DriveSavers Data Recovery

06/03/2026

By the time a ransomware incident hits, the contact list you'd reach for may already be encrypted with the rest of your data.

This checklist covers 5 things to document and store outside your primary systems, giving your team the basics at their fingertips when everything's moving fast.

Read the full article at the link in the comments.

05/27/2026

Read the article in the comments for a walkthrough of the full data recovery process inside the DriveSavers lab, from intake to delivery.

Useful for setting client expectations, explaining an escalation, or if you've ever wondered what happens to a device after you send it in.

05/21/2026

When a ransomware attack occurs, the contacts and recovery documentation a team needs often live in the same systems the threat actor has encrypted. The team ends up reconstructing the list from memory while they should be focused on restoring business operations.

Click the link in the comments for an article covering five items worth documenting now and storing outside your primary systems.

05/12/2026

A human hair cross-section dwarfs a hard drive's read/write head. A dust particle isn't far behind.

Those tolerances are why cleanroom conditions exist for hard drive recovery. Click the link in the comments for an article that covers what an ISO Class 5 cleanroom controls that a clean bench doesn't.

05/05/2026

The New Yorker published a feature on the world of data recovery, written by Julian Lucas, with DriveSavers at the center of it. Julian spent time in our cleanroom and Flash Physical Department in January, watching the work up close.

The piece covers a lot, but the part that matters most to us is that it captures what our engineers and customer care team do every day. The careful, patient work of recovering files that people thought were gone for good.

To everyone at DriveSavers who made the article what it is: thank you.

It happens to the best of us—the farmer who plowed over his smartphone, the biologist with a flooded lab, the professional photographer whose dog chewed through his SD card just after an important shoot. “Losing files is inevitable in our paperless, data-driven, device-mediated world, notwithstanding its fanciful promises of cloud-based immortality,” Julian Lucas writes. For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers, which receives some 20,000 inquiries each month. It has saved data for government agencies, multinational corporations, and more than a few celebrities. Sidney Poitier recovered a draft of his memoir through the company’s good offices; Khloé Kardashian, a phone that fell into a pool. Lucas pays a visit to the experts who can summon lost files from the void.

05/04/2026

From recovering ILM's special effects to saving Han Solo's personal photos, DriveSavers rescues your galaxy of data. May the 4th be with you!

05/01/2026

KQED Forum spent an hour this week on what happens when your hard drive dies. Sarah Farrell joined host Alexis Madrigal and The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas, whose recent feature "Resurrection Hardware" sparked the conversation.

Sarah walked through chip-level work on damaged phones and a few Bizarre Diskasters cases, including a smartphone sliced in half on a monorail and another that was baked inside an oven.

Bay Area listeners called in with their own data loss stories. Our former data crisis counselor, Kelly Chessen, also joined to describe how she helped callers through the grieving process.

Link to the episode in the comments.

04/30/2026

This is Julian Lucas during his January visit, captured during one of the moments described in his The New Yorker article.

One of his stops in our lab was the Flash Physical Department, where data recovery engineers perform chip-level microsoldering on every kind of flash media we recover: smartphones, SSDs, embedded SSDs, USB flash drives, camera cards, and more. Julian sat down at a workstation and tried it himself: heating the solder balls, removing a chip, fitting a replacement. He accidentally fused a few resistors in the process, but the data would have been salvageable.

A solid first attempt at microsoldering.

Link to our companion article in the comments.

04/29/2026

The print edition of The New Yorker hit newsstands this week, with Julian Lucas's feature on DriveSavers running under the headline "Resurrection Hardware." Look for "The Anguish of Data Loss" on the cover.

The piece covers the work behind professional data recovery and the people who do it, drawn from Julian's January visit to our Novato lab. See the comments for the link to a companion piece we put together on how to keep your devices out of our lab in the first place, with a link to Julian's full article.

04/22/2026

The New Yorker published a beautiful piece on data loss and data recovery. Julian Lucas spent time in our Novato lab in January, and we're grateful he treated the work and the team with such care. We wrote a companion piece on how to keep your devices out of our lab in the first place: https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/press-coverage/drivesavers-featured-in-the-new-yorker/

A broken phone or corrupted drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. But sometimes data-recovery experts can summon lost files from the void.