Oscar Winners Turn to DriveSavers for Film’s Data Recovery

By all accounts, no one in the television audience of 39.3 million people could probably tell that the father and daughter team of Terry and Oorlagh George had anything to worry about. Standing on the stage at the annual academy awards ceremony, they beamed with joy holding their gold Oscar statuettes in their hands, having just won the award for best live action short film. Even after facing dozens of photographers and providing countless interviews, there was never a hint that all was not well with their award-winning film “The Shore”.

But after the evening’s ceremony and after-parties, the pair wondered if anyone would ever see the version of the film they had labored to create and lost in an unusual circumstance.

Shot completely in digital format, “The Shore” was edited into multiple versions using Apple’s Final Cut Pro. “We created several versions of the film”, explained Producer Oorlagh George. “We edited the film to an airplane friendly version, another for television with cuts for commercials, a film festival version for time constraints and our preferred version-also known as a Director’s Cut.”

All of the Final Cut Pro project files for the various versions of the film “lived” on a MacBook Pro laptop computer that was configured for automatic backups. Yet, somehow after the MacBook refused to boot up and its files were restored, it was discovered that the critical Director’s Cut version of the film was missing.

“We went to the Oscars-and we won!” Oorlagh recalled. “Since the drive was in transit to DriveSavers, we didn’t think we would get the version of the film back that we really wanted people see.” But, after just two days, DriveSavers rescued the irreplaceable Director’s Cut along with her family photos and notes for a television series she was developing.

Oorlagh summed up her experience with a laugh saying, “We are so grateful to the kind people at DriveSavers, they are just amazing. I would use them again in a heartbeat…but hope I never have to!”