KQED Forum Features DriveSavers in “When Your Devices Fritz And Your Digital Life Is Lost. What Next?”
KQED Forum host Alexis Madrigal devoted his April 29, 2026 episode to the story of digital data loss, with New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas, our Director of Business Development Sarah Farrell and former Data Crisis Counselor Kelly Chessen as guests. The show built on Lucas’s recent New Yorker feature about DriveSavers, “Resurrection Hardware,” and spent the hour going further into the work and the people behind it.
Sarah Farrell, Director of Business Development at DriveSavers, talked about her years of experience in our flash memory lab, where she worked on physically damaged phones, SSDs, and other devices using soldering irons, hot air rework stations, and microscopes. She explained how DriveSavers engineers “marry” together damaged chips inside an iPhone, why a chip transplant is sometimes the last option, and shared her favorite stories from our Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, including the smartphone sliced cleanly in half on a monorail track and a phone that ended up baked inside an oven after sticking to a sheet pan via MagSafe.
Kelly Chessen, former Data Crisis Counselor at DriveSavers, who came to DriveSavers after working for a suicide prevention and crisis line, described her former role helping callers work through the emotional side of data loss. She framed it as a grieving process and offered practical advice: pause, acknowledge the loss, and allow yourself to feel it.
Throughout the hour, Bay Area listeners called and wrote in with their own data loss and recovery stories.
