1800 440 190

DriveSavers Featured in The New Yorker

DriveSavers Featured in The New Yorker

The New Yorker published a feature on April 20, 2026, titled “When Your Digital Life Vanishes,” written by staff writer Julian Lucas. Look for it in the April 27 print edition under the headline “Resurrection Hardware.” Below is a short recap of the article and four tips for minimizing your data loss.

A Look Inside the DriveSavers Lab

Julian Lucas, staff writer for The New Yorker, visited our Novato lab in January and spoke with engineers and leaders across the company, including Director of Engineering and CISO, Mike Cobb, Director of Business Development, Sarah Farrell, and Head of Cyber Recovery, Andy Maus. The article covers what happens behind the scenes in professional data recovery—and why, when data loss strikes, so many people trust DriveSavers.

He toured the $2M cleanroom, where hard drives are opened under HEPA filtration, spent time in the Flash Physical Department, where engineers perform microsoldering and chip-level work on smartphones and SSDs, and the Logical Department, where files are reconstructed from damaged media. The article also covers the growth in ransomware recoveries at DriveSavers, from fewer than 50 cases in 2023 to nearly 300 last year.

The piece follows customer stories, including jugglers whose PowerBook went underwater in a 1993 cruise-ship sinking on the Amazon, a filmmaker whose Catskills footage was recovered after his external drive fell to the floor, and a family whose drives experienced extreme heat from the California wildfires. Lucas also references the range of notable clients who chose DriveSavers to recover their irreplaceable data, from government agencies to public figures.

Asked about the future of the industry, DriveSavers CEO Alex Hagan told The New Yorker: “Technology will continue to improve, but as long as humans are involved, there’s room for error. People continue to break stuff.”

What the Article Teaches About Data Loss (and What We Want You to Take Away)

Hagan is right. People continue to break stuff. And even when they don’t, drives fail, fires happen, water gets in, ransomware hits, and sometimes an AI agent deletes a folder it wasn’t supposed to touch.

The stories in The New Yorker piece are dramatic on purpose: a laptop pulled from a sunken ship, drives salvaged from a house fire, a filmmaker’s footage saved after a drive crashed to the floor. But most data loss isn’t dramatic. Most of the time it’s quiet. A drive starts clicking. A photo library won’t open. An automatic backup software that was supposed to be running wasn’t.

We receive all types of “Disk-asters” every day. The dramatic cases make for better stories. The quiet ones are more common, and they’re the ones you can do something about before you need us.

Read more interesting stories from Lucas’s visit at the online article if you’re a The New Yorker subscriber or in the April 27 print edition under the headline “Resurrection Hardware.”

Here are four tips for minimizing your data loss.

Back Up Your Data (and Follow the 3-2-1 Rule)

A working backup determines whether a drive failure becomes real data loss. Most customers who lose data permanently had a backup situation that failed them in some way: it wasn’t current, wasn’t running, or wasn’t there at all.

The industry standard is the 3-2-1 rule. Keep three copies of your data, on two different kinds of storage media, with one copy stored offsite. In practice, that might look like this:

The files on your computer (copy 1)

An external hard drive backup (copy 2, different media)

A cloud backup service like Backblaze or iCloud (copy 3, offsite)

The idea is that no single event, whether a drive failure, a fire, a theft, or a ransomware infection, can take out all three at once.

A few things we see trip people up. A backup that isn’t running isn’t a backup, so check that yours is actually completing, schedule it if it’s manual, and verify it occasionally by opening a file from the backup. Cloud sync is not the same as a backup: services like iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Drive mirror your current state, which means a deleted or corrupted file gets deleted or corrupted on every device. Some services offer version history or trash recovery for a limited window, but those aren’t substitutes for a real backup. And external drives age. If your backup drive is more than five years old, it’s worth replacing. The New Yorker piece notes that the average hard drive lifespan is just under seven years.

Learn the Warning Signs of a Failing Drive

Most drives give you some warning before they fail. The warnings are easy to miss or dismiss, though, and knowing what to listen and look for can buy you enough time to get your data off before the drive goes.

HDD

For traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), the classic warning signs are:

  • Clicking, grinding, buzzing, or beeping sounds (the “click of death”)
  • Unusually slow file access, boot times, or copy speeds
  • Files or folders that vanish, become inaccessible, or show as corrupted
  • Frequent system freezes, crashes, or blue screens
  • The drive disappears from your computer and reappears
  • SMART errors reported by your operating system

SSD

For solid-state drives (SSDs), the signs look different. SSDs have no moving parts, so they don’t click or grind. They also tend to fail more suddenly than HDDs, with less advance warning. Signs include:

  • Files that become read-only or can’t be saved
  • “Bad block” errors
  • Sudden freezes during file operations
  • The drive is showing free space but failing to accept new writes
  • The drive disappearing from BIOS or system recognition

If you see any of these signs, treat them as urgent. The window between “drive acting weird” and “drive won’t turn on” can be very short.

What to Do (and What Not to Do) When an HDD Starts Failing

The first question is whether the drive is making any mechanical noise it didn’t make before: clicking, grinding, buzzing, or beeping. If it is, stop. Don’t try to mount the drive, don’t try to copy anything off of it, don’t power it on again. Every additional spin-up risks turning a recoverable situation into an unrecoverable one. Set the drive aside and call a professional.

If the drive is quiet but showing other symptoms (slow access, files that won’t open, disappearing and reappearing), and it still mounts, the next move is to get your most important files off of it as quickly and efficiently as you can. One focused copy, irreplaceable files first, then power the drive down. Don’t browse, don’t reorganize, don’t open files to check them. Every read, write, and boot cycle gives a failing drive another chance to fail completely.

Once you’ve pulled what you can, stop using the drive. This is where people get into trouble. It’s tempting to keep going, especially if the drive seems to be working again, but “seems to be working” is exactly the state in which drives fail permanently. People often think they’ll “just finish this one thing” and end up losing everything in the process.

Don’t open the drive yourself. Hard drives are opened in a cleanroom under HEPA filtration for a reason, and The New Yorker piece puts it plainly: a single grain of dust can strip the magnetic film and obliterate the data underneath. DIY YouTube videos make drive disassembly look doable. It isn’t.

Be especially careful about recovery software. These tools assume the drive is functioning and the data is only logically lost. If the drive is mechanically failing, running recovery software gives it more chances to die. Logical damage and physical damage are different problems, and software designed for one can make the other worse.

A couple of stubborn myths are worth addressing. Don’t try to dry out a water-damaged drive in rice or in the sun. The water evaporates and leaves mineral deposits behind that are harder to recover from than the original moisture. If a drive gets wet, keep it sealed in a plastic bag and get it to a professional. Don’t put a drive in the freezer, either. This advice circulates on tech forums every few years. It doesn’t work, and it can cause condensation damage on top of whatever was already wrong.

When to Call a Professional

If your drive has been physically damaged, dropped, crushed, burned, or water-exposed, stop troubleshooting and call a professional. The same is true if the drive is clicking, grinding, or making any mechanical noise it didn’t make before, or if it’s no longer being recognized by any computer. And if you’ve already tried DIY software and things got worse, the time to stop is now.

The other situations where professional help is worth the call: when the data on the drive is irreplaceable, and when you’re facing a ransomware situation in which backups were destroyed or encrypted.

At DriveSavers, we work on every type of storage device, from consumer hard drives and smartphones to enterprise servers and RAID arrays. Our “no data, no charge” policy covers most devices: if we can’t recover your data, you don’t pay a recovery fee.

If you’re in that situation right now, contact DriveSavers at +61 (2) 40630812.

Read the Full New Yorker Feature

The New Yorker piece is a beautiful piece of writing about the fragility of our digital lives and the craft of bringing files back from the edge. We’re grateful to Julian Lucas for the time he spent with our team.

If there’s one thing we’d want every reader to take from the article, it’s also the thing that would put us out of business if everyone followed it: back up your data, pay attention to the warning signs, power down when something starts acting wrong, and when you do need help, call DriveSavers.

Read the full article at The New Yorker
Related Posts

DriveSavers Senior Marketing Manager
Writing about DriveSavers, data recovery, or another technology-related topic?
Contact us.

Twitter
Back To Top
Search