Lightning Strikes School Laptop: SSD Data Recovery

Manuel Lujan knew how important it was to protect the privacy of the students in his school district in Colorado. As the technology coordinator, he was responsible for ensuring that the school district followed all the regulations required by both FERPA and HIPAA.

One day, a laptop’s solid-state drive suffered a power surge—possibly from a lightning strike—and stopped working. Manuel knew that he needed to find a company that had the necessary certifications to maintain the security and safety of the data. Manuel called several data recovery companies and found that none of them could honor the required FERPA or HIPAA requirements for data security. After extensive research, he found DriveSavers.

Manuel spoke with a DriveSavers Data Recovery Advisor and found that DriveSavers has the certifications required by the school district to protect its data. Assured the data would be safe, Manuel sent the solid-state NVMe drive to DriveSavers.

Despite severe mechanical issues, logical problems, and corruption throughout the data, the engineers got a full data recovery, and, to Manuel’s amazement, DriveSavers recovered 100% of the data from the SSD. In addition, the files were in the original structure, making it easy for Manuel to restore the data to the laptop.

Manuel was confident that he had made the right choice in choosing DriveSavers, and he was grateful for their exceptional service. This experience educated Manuel. He added DriveSavers, a reputable and professional data recovery company that complied with FERPA and HIPAA regulations, as part of the school district’s incident response plan for future data recovery needs. He signed up for the DriveSavers Education Partner Program, which provides the school district with discounts and benefits offered to partners in the program. Now Manuel has a solution to turn to immediately when another data loss situation arises.

Video Transcript

I am Manuel Lujan, technology coordinator for the Huerfano School District out of Walsenburg, Colorado. I have been in education technology for approximately twenty-two years. Our problem was a hard drive with a laptop, more specifically an SSD NVMe drive. It just stopped working. We do believe that it was lightning strike or a severe surge of power that decided to take out that drive.  DriveSavers saved us.

In our situation, it was Word documents, PowerPoint, Excel, publisher, pretty much all the normal office paperwork and documents. The user had a lot of pictures, just pretty much any kind of content you can think of.   Drivesavers was able to recover 100% of it.

DriveSavers was a wonderful company to work with.  As a school district, we have rules and regulations that we have to pay attention to: FERPA and or HIPAA, depending on what the data was.  In our situation, we actually had to worry about both.  While similar, there are some differences in nuances with the data and how important that is to maintain security and safety of the data.  When I first started reaching out to different vendors to try to determine what our options were for data recovery,  DriveSavers was the only vendor of several that was willing to entertain and extensively discuss those concerns right off the bat.

After those concerns were put to rest, the shipping label was sent to us and sent the product in overnight, and by 8:00 AM the very next morning I was on the phone call with them explaining to me what the status of the recovery was, which at that point they said eighty to a hundred percent possibility of recovery. And they then explained that when they talk recovery, it’s not just, here’s the file name. It is whatever the content is what’s there.

And in the end of the day, we were one hundred percent recovered and pricing was quite well! Very happy with them. Would strongly recommend them again.

Considering the nature of SSD drives and how that data is erased and rewritten and shifted and moved and everything with SSD drives, the technical capabilities of the engineers is quite extensive. With being able to recover 100% of the data for a drive that experienced severe loss, at least for an end user, was quite extensive, and I would hands down say that they know what they’re doing.

I absolutely would recommend DriveSavers if you find yourself in a situation needing data recovery.