Reviewed on Dec 20 2016 | Washington, DC
So I spilled peanut sauce on my laptop.
Into my laptop, specifically. I had the brilliant idea of sitting a bowl of peanut sauce ramen on my bed, next to my laptop, then sat on my bed, spilling the sauce through the speaker holes and into my machine.
Worse still: it was an old machine, 4.5 year and counting, with an SSD drive that had already run through almost 90% of its max... Read More cycles.
The machine shut down, the drive fried, and all was lost.
Typically I back up everything, both to an external drive and to the cloud, for the sake of redundancy.
The only things I didn't have backed up this way:
- My business receipts for 2016
- The 20-hour project I had just completed for a client
- and a project I'd designed as a Christmas gift.
Why I didn't back these up....I really don't know, but the end result was that they seemed lost.
I am an engineer myself, so I rigged up an SSD sled, ran all the softwares I knew, and still could recover nothing.
That was when I took the drive to Secure Data Recovery.
I dropped it off, hoped for the best, and 4 days later heard the news:
The drive was recoverable, but it would take up to 3 months to repair and would cost more than two new laptops to do the work.
Not in the budget.
So it looks like I'm doing all that work again, lesson learned. Not what I wanted from my Christmas season, but such is life. I was due to get myself a new laptop anyway, and now that I know the SSD is fried I might as well buy a new drive and test it out in the old machine, since i've stripped it and deep-scrubbed it with isopropyl alcohol already anyway.
I digress.
Though I chose not to have the work done, Jeremy was understanding and professional the whole time.
He even had the courtesy to 'make the arrangements' (a statement impressively mobster) to 'recycle it free of charge' (less mobster).
Next time my culinary experiments result in data disaster, I know immediately who I will call. That recovery was even possible is a testament to their abilities. That Jeremy managed to make me laugh while embracing a reality of 100+ hours of work to be redone over the Christmas holidays is a testament to their professionalism and good nature.
Use them. They won't mind.
- David