07/20/2026
Adventures In Computer Consulting Part 2
People have expressed an interest in the stories I tell about my experiences as a computer consultant and have asked me to share more of these stories so here goes.
I have been recovering people’s data for decades now, from undeleting important files that accidentally got trashed to recovering data from whole hard drives. This is another old story from 20+ years ago. Apple for a time used some really bad hard drives in their early flat screen iMacs. These drives ran extremely hot, would often cause problems to important internal components like video cards, and generally lessened the life of these computers because heat is kryptonite to computers. Client brought me his dead iMac, said he absolutely had to have the data recovered and he didn’t care if I destroyed the computer to get the hard drive out. I pulled the drive and plopped it into an open external case I had and set about trying to recover his data. I would start to backup let’s say his Documents Folder only to have it fail to copy after a few minutes and would freeze my computer. I would restart and then try copying just a few folders or files at a time until the drive locked up again and I would have to restart. This was in December and my desk was right by the sliding door in my bedroom. I positioned the drive in its open external case right by the cracked open sliding door in an effort to keep it cool enough so that I could back up his files. I spent every free moment I had for the next month sitting by the open sliding door, bundled up in my winter coat, scarf and hat, copying files from this 500GB hard drive, often having to copy files one at a time to get them copied. Eventually I recovered every single one of his files, his photos, his music, everything. These are the lengths I have often gone to for my clients in order to recover their data. I think I charged him $200 which was a far cry from the Data Recovery Services that had quoted him $3,000. He gave me $500.
