Santa Monica Mayor Beats the Odds Thanks to DriveSavers

Mike Feinstein, former Mayor of Santa Monica, CA and established political writer, splashed water on his MacBook while vacationing in Mexico. He continued using the computer, unknowingly causing further electrical damage and corrosion. Eventually, the device would no longer power on.

He took the laptop to a local repair shop in Mexico, where they repaired the computer by replacing the main logic board. Unfortunately, Feinstein didn’t realize his Macbook Pro’s data storage was embedded on the damaged logic board. He now found himself in a critical data loss scenario. When he inquired with the local shop, they told him that his data couldn’t be recovered. To make matters worse, Feinstein learned that the board containing his data had been shipped to Apple to be responsibly decommissioned. 

With no current backup, he faced the loss of his irreplaceable files and emails.

One of the amazing things about the technical work that DriveSavers did is that the amount of water damage that I caused unknowingly because I’m sitting there and playing around with my laptop when there’s water inside, I got water all over the electrical systems, and basically screwed up the ability for the electrical system to communicate with itself. And they found a way to work around that and create new connections, new synapses if we want to take an analogy from our own nervous system.

That blows my mind. That means that they went to the deepest level of how something could go wrong and still had a way to fix it. It’s like dealing with somebody who’s doing open heart surgery. You only go to a special surgeon who can go in there and do that right. Thank you, universe. Thank you, DriveSavers.
Mike Feinstein

Video Transcript

Hi, everyone. My name is Mike Feinstein, I’m from Santa Monica, California. And I’m here in beautiful Morelia Michoacan, Mexico. I have been a political activist and a world traveler for many, many years. I’ve traveled in 50 countries many of them many times, like here in Mexico, like 30 times. So as a person who’s still heavily involved in politics, I’m a co-founder of the Green Party and California.

Point is, having my laptop having my mobile hotspot and then living out of my car has been enabling me to travel and keep connected and doing my work in the US while I’m here in paradise in Mexico until the damage with my laptop. So the crazy way that my laptop got damaged was I remember as I was tossing the water up on top of my car, a little bit of the water went in into the window and I want to just check online before I leave, my laptop doesn’t start. What is going on here?

I was absolutely freaked out. No, it doesn’t boot up, nothing. I find a place called Mac Geek, go in there, leave the laptop with them, they tell me that they’re not sure, it’s going to take a couple of days, that they have to– that for sure, they have to replace the logic board. They spend a couple of hours looking at everything, but they have to order the logic board from Mexico City.

So now I’m in this bind where my laptop doesn’t work, they have to wait a few days to get the logic board, and we can’t know whether they’re going to be able to recoup the data apparently until they get the new logic board and run some tests, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, they tell me that they can’t recoup the data. And I’m like, what? They’re telling me I can’t recoup my data, I’m sitting here with a six-month trip in Mexico, my professional work depends on my ability to have all this information.

I’m a political writer, I get published in a lot of political publications and I can’t access any of my work, and I probably lost a bunch of it. So I’m like, what am I going to do? I go ahead and I call Mac 911 in Santa Monica, the place that I go to back in the US to fix my stuff. And I call Felix, who’s the manager there, and I’m like, Felix, what do I do? He tells me about DriveSavers. These are people who are known worldwide, that a normal Mac repair store may not be able to restore stuff, but these people can do it.

And I called DriveSaver in northern California, and I’m sitting here in this Mac Geek office, speaking English, on my cell phone, with my attitude that I’m not going to accept it that I can’t get my data back, and there has to be a way to do it. And I talked to them, and they tell me that, hey, you know, yeah, we probably can fix it. You have to send it back here. I go ahead and I told this to the guy– the manager there at Mac Geek. I said this to him, he says, no, we can’t do that, that’s not possible.

So now we’re sitting with the concern that my laptop is– or my logic board is in Mexico City at the warehouse and what DriveSavers told me is that, the moment they touch it and start to take it apart, you can never get the data back. So I’m thinking, oh my God. It’s in their warehouse, it’s going to be taken apart, and I’m going to lose everything.

So Jackie Cunningham, who works at DriveSavers, who’s one of their top people, pulls the absolute miracle. She’s calling Apple, who’s in the US and in Mexico, and pulling strings and getting a hold of people. And eventually, unbelievable, she gets a hold of the right people and they pull it off the floor in the warehouse in Mexico City, like, I don’t know, moments before, hours before they’re about to take it apart.

One of the really scary parts about losing the data was what I couldn’t recover or what would be such a hassle to recover that it would be much more worth me paying DriveSavers than trying to go through that all my time. I’m one of the co-founders of the Green Party of California and the Green Party in the United States and one of our primary historians and archivists. And there was a lot of material on my laptop that I had not backed up fully or appropriately in other places.

When the logic board went back to DriveSavers, they took an initial look at it and they said, OK, we think that we can recover your data. And then they tell me that my job is going to be a lot more complicated than normal. The amount of water damage that happened, because it got so spread around, damaged a lot of the electronics in the logic board and made it impossible for the normal connections that happen in between data to be accessed, to be effectuated.

So they either recoup your data for you, recover your data for you, and you pay, or if they don’t, you don’t pay anything. When you think about– you’re putting down the money, you made a mistake, you didn’t have your stuff backed up, now you’re desperate, these are the only people you can go to. And if they can recover stuff that you don’t have, if they can save you money, and if they’re giving you a set price, regardless of how much time it involves for them, in my mind, that’s really a good deal. As they had to basically build new systems to be able to make connections between the data because what was there was dead.

This is like somebody– your neurons aren’t firing in your own cellular structure in your body, and they have to make new pathways for everything to connect. That’s essentially what they did. They texted me back and said, great news, it’s here.

The miracle happens, I get my external drive, it has all the data. DriveSavers recovered the structure of all my files, of my music, of my pictures, of my email. And the email also was incredibly important. Most of us aren’t so familiar necessarily with being able to restore everything after we’ve lost it, and DriveSavers delivers on that end as well. What’s the message from the universe here? The message fortunately in the end is that DriveSavers has their act together.

So one of the great things about the service from DriveSavers is that they keep giving you updates. I’m getting emails, I’m getting texts, I’m getting phone calls telling me where things are at in the process. These people really care about their job. They take pride in it, it they’re excited about it, and you want to hear that.

One of the amazing things about the technical work that DriveSavers did is that the amount of water damage that I caused unknowingly because I’m sitting there and playing around with my laptop when there’s water inside, I got water all over the electrical systems, and basically screwed up the ability for the electrical system to communicate with itself. And they found a way to work around that and create new connections, new synapses if we want to take an analogy from our own nervous system.

That blows my mind. That means that they went to the deepest level of how something could go wrong and still had a way to fix it. It’s like dealing with somebody who’s doing open heart surgery. You only go to a special surgeon who can go in there and do that right. Thank you, universe. Thank you, DriveSavers.

So I would recommend DriveSavers unconditionally, and why? Because they have combined technical expertise, customer service, being really connected in their industry, and caring about their customers. And the other thing that makes it so worthwhile and why I would recommend DriveSavers is not only do they pull together the technical knowledge and the commitment to their customers and all of that but there really aren’t a lot of places in the world that can do what they’re doing. These people provide a service that you almost can’t find anywhere else, and they do it in an incredibly professional way. When you have nowhere to turn but you want to feel good about your only option, DriveSavers is the place to go.