Doug Menuez Professional Photographer and Film Maker

Doug Menuez, an award-winning document Photographer, shares his experience of losing his data and working with DriveSavers.

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Doug Menuez. I’m a documentary photographer and filmmaker. I’ve been freelancing and shooting and producing my own work since 1983. So I have most of my archives scanned and on radar devices. And this is work that I did for Time, or Newsweek, or major companies like Apple Computer.

And so one day a drive failed. It’s hot-swappable, so I popped in a new drive, and it began doing its data protection sequence. And it can take a day or two because I had about 16 terabytes of data on this particular one. And then I had another drive fail and another. The same thing started to happen.

On these hard drives that failed were not only my portfolios over the years and all of my client’s work, but book projects, and personal work. I kind of went into denial. This can’t be happening. I’ve rarely lost data. I’ve always tried to back things up. Of course, this time I was trusting the technology. And it failed through a circumstance that was beyond anyone’s control. But still, it was devastating.

Well, after I realized this was not going away, that I wasn’t going to be able to finesse my way out of this, I immediately thought of DriveSavers. That was the first thing I thought. Everyone knows DriveSavers, honestly, in my career. Well, there’s never been another source for data recovery that I would ever think of. So that was the first thought.

Well, my first call to DriveSavers was very interesting. It was almost like therapy. Because they talked me down off the ledge. I was convinced by one of the DriveSavers technicians that I could probably get some data off, but 16 terabytes, the drives would probably fail in the middle of that. The probability was that I would lose most of the data at some point. So I had to turn it over to DriveSavers and trust in them.

So DriveSavers, actually, only was able to recover 85% of the data. And everybody was pretty happy with that. But I did call them back. And I said, great job, guys. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate all this effort. But are you sure you can’t get more of this data? And I got a long technical explanation. No, they’re right. This is impossible. They did their best. It took weeks to do it. But I can still see the data. So I wasn’t going to give up. So I emailed, and I wrote, and I called, and I implored them to try again. Something triggered them and they decided to give it another shot. And I was really amazed at that.

And that’s one of the reasons why I’m here sitting with you. Because this is the best company I know of to do data recovery. I mean, they’re pulling stuff out of the ocean. I mean, they’re legendary. And yet, I’m still missing this data. And I just had the faith that somehow they could figure this out. Two weeks went by and I got a cryptic voicemail saying, I don’t want to get too excited, I don’t want you to get your hopes up, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ll be back in touch. So like a week or 10 days go by, and I get an email with a FedEx air bill. And it comes and all the data is there. They recovered all the data. So I got 100% of my data back, 100%.

And you know what? I was like, of course, I got 100% with DriveSavers. I really think DriveSavers has the best engineers around. And I can say that from experience documenting engineers and programmers. I would highly recommend DriveSavers to someone who’s experienced data loss and needs to recover that data. I mean, what they did for me, it was above and beyond. And there was no charge for going back in and trying again. That, it just sets them apart. You can’t get that kind of customer service almost– there’s hardly any company that will do that kind of customer service. I just don’t know. I highly recommend it.

DriveSavers. We can save it®!