How To Cope With Data Loss, After Weeping Like a Newborn - By Laser-Guided Awesome, The SF Weekly Utility Blog

I learned two things while visiting the Apple Store yesterday: 1) My hard drive is fucked and 2) they won’t serve you booze to ease your pain at the Genius Bar, even if you scream at them. The Apple dude carefully took my laptop out of my hands and presumably took it out back to put it out of its misery. I tried hard not to think about the important things that were now erased into oblivion. I needed help. There are many ways to deal with this.

My girlfriend held me and told me that we would get through this together, but my laptop was so young and full of life (and by “life,” I mean “awesome naked pictures”). But I knew there were several ways to deal with this. —James Y Lee

Hire a Miracle Worker
There are a few data recovery centers around the city that specialize as gravediggers in extracting out those precious files from your dead hard drive. There are specialists out there that are able to recover data from computers that have been through fire, water, or somehow became road kill. On the other hand, a pricey 100 dollar exam for just a billing estimate that can run up to 3,000 bucks will make anyone want to tape bubble wrap around their fragile MacBook. However, if you think your marriage will last and those wedding albums might be handy to keep around or don’t have the time to stage a shooting spree over your lost doctoral thesis, a place like Hard Drive 911 in the mission, who have been employed even by the Federal Government, might be a good solution.

Talk about Your Feelings
But if you’re, let’s say, a poor but incredibly handsome writer, and don’t have that kind of cash to burn, it might be a lot cheaper to just repair the emotional damage. This is when you can give crisis counselor Kelly Chessen a call. Bay area company DriveSavers does phone consultation before sending in that miserable piece of shit hard drive for data recovery. They couldn’t handle all the bitching from their distressed and suicidal callers, so they hired Kelly Chessen, a former suicide hotline worker.

“Part of what I do is explore their feelings. Talk about what happened.,” says Chessen, “The average call was 20 minutes at the suicide hotline and it’s the same at DriveSavers. Suprisingly, it’s never as long as you think. We just all need somebody to hear us, make sense of what’s happening.” Anyone that knows of AA is familiar with the steps: Denial, anger, depression, acceptance, yada yada. Without having you talk about your childhood, crybaby--in short, Chessen says when you begin to get all frowny and place importance on the data that was lost, you should try coming to terms with it and slowly devise a way to move foward. If you lost your only child’s baby pictures, proactively email everyone to see if they still have the pictures you sent to them a few years ago. If they tossed them out as soon as they got them (like most people do with baby pictures), think of alternative ways to get a hold of them. Or just take a step toward acceptance that you most likely had an ugly baby.

Learn from It
A place like DriveSavers doesn’t really market it, but they do consultation work, so you won’t have to resort to cutting yourself in self-hate. According to these data recovery guys there’s an onslaught of people losing data after the Holiday season because they left their computer on while on vacation or for whatever reason. So it might be a good time to begin a habit of periodically backing up your hard drive once a month. If it has heavy-flow and you happen to be saving a lot of work onto it, back that shit up more often. Remember: Making the same mistake twice will start to suggest you have a learning disability.