DriveSavers Data Recovery

06/25/2026

James's iPhone 12 Pro Max fell into a bonfire in Mexico. By the time he noticed and pulled it out, the screen had separated from the body, and the casing had turned black. He burned his fingers on the metal grabbing it from the fire.

He didn't realize his last iCloud backup was 13 months old. Every photo and video from the trip was on that device, as were the files for a business he'd just started.

Find out what it took for DriveSavers to get his data back at the link in the comments.

06/10/2026

Threat actors are increasingly compromising snapshot chains and backup repositories before encrypting the primary server. By the time a breach is detected, the path to recovery has already been eliminated.

Click the link in the comments for an article where DriveSavers Data Recovery’s Head of Cyber Recovery Services, Andy Maus, explores the AI-driven evolution of ransomware in 2026.

His analysis details the strategic targeting of backup infrastructure and hypervisors, explaining why traditional disaster recovery strategies predicated on the availability of backups are becoming obsolete.

06/05/2026

Data recovery comes with a few common assumptions, and some of them can make a bad situation worse.

Here are four, with the reality next to each. Watch to the end.

If you work in IT or repair, they're useful for setting customer expectations.

Read more about how data recovery works at the link in the comments.

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.