When Your Digital Life Vanishes

The man had been slumped over his laptop for a week by the time his body was discovered. His deliquescent tissue had seeped under the keys, short-circuiting the motherboard. It was a killing from beyond the grave, flesh and blood’s revenge on silicon. Yet digital death differs, crucially, from the genuine article. Sometimes, with luck, it can be reversed.It happens to the best of us—the farmer who plowed over his smartphone, the biologist with a flooded lab, the professional photographer whose dog chewed through his SD card just after an important shoot. Losing files is inevitable in our paperless, data-driven, device-mediated world, notwithstanding its fanciful promises of cloud-based immortality.I used to count myself one of the prepared. Little escapes my archival dragnet: I keep every phone I’ve ever owned in a labelled shoebox, and the archived “souls” of long-defunct computers on a PC called Thoth, for the Egyptian god who records the weighing of hearts on the journey to the afterlife. Then, six years ago, I set my iPhone down on the edge of my bathroom sink, and it fell, shattering on the tiles.The spiderwebbed screen bled colors, and the keypad flashed, as though ghostly fingers were trying to guess my passcode. I winced at the expense, but the intangible costs emerged more slowly. I realized that the phone had stopped synching with my iCloud, and, when I brought it to a repair shop, they couldn’t fix it. Among the likely casualties were some of the last texts and voice mails I’d received from my father, who’d died of heart failure not long before.It was from him that I’d learned to protect my files in the first place. Growing up, I practically lived in his home recording studio, a starship’s bridge of mixers and monitors where he set aside a corner for my experiments with code. A musician who’d played with Miles Davis, and written and produced for Madonna, he was also a data hoarder, and he had spent a decade digitizing his extensive record collection for a custom music server that he dubbed Soulbro.My father taught me to burn disks, to back up files, and to discharge static electricity before handling a computer’s delicate innards.

He had a surgically implanted defibrillator and liked to call himself a cyborg—a boast laced with irony, because the device periodically misfired, delivering shocks that could knock him to the ground. He spent his final weeks in an I.C.U., which appeared to me like a nightmare double of his studio, its monitors transcribing the rhythms of his own waning heart.The studio took years to clear out. I made disk images of the half-dozen computers, which were subsequently dismantled. Then, this fall, my mother found two hard drives we’d overlooked, which could have been either mine or his. Both failed to register when I plugged them into my computer; one made an ominous grinding noise. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to let them go.For thousands of data-loss victims, the last resort is a recovery service called DriveSavers. It’s a half hour from San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge, in the balmy, scenic suburb of Novato. The boxy, low-rise office overlooks a verdant wetland frequented by otters and egrets. Visiting in January, I felt that I’d arrived in hard-disk heaven.I was greeted by Sarah Farrell and Mike Cobb, two directors of the company. Farrell, a teacherly woman with blond hair and a beekeeping hobby, oversees business development but used to be an engineer. “In the lab, I just assume everything has been in the toilet,” she told me. “During COVID, I can’t even tell you what people spilled on their MacBooks.” Cobb, who runs engineering, is a genial man with lively blue eyes, and once saved a computer tower from a burrowing squirrel: “He peed right on the power supply.” Cutesy anecdotes alternated with triumphs and tragedies—a school district rescued from a ransomware gang, an iPad salvaged from a plane crash. “They made me too sad,” Farrell said of the worst cases. “I had to be, like, ‘Symptoms, no story,’ or I’d never be able to go home.”Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “

It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”DriveSavers receives some twenty thousand inquiries each month. It has saved data for government agencies, multinational corporations, and more than a few celebrities, whose autographed portraits beamed from the lobby walls. Sidney Poitier recovered a draft of his memoir through the company’s good offices; Khloé Kardashian, a phone that fell into a pool. Data loss has been the digital age’s great equalizer: What else could bring together such disparate figures as Willie Nelson, Buzz Aldrin, Gonzo the Muppet, and Gerald Ford?The memorabilia dated back to the eighties. Back then, hard drives stored so little and cost so much that they were generally more valuable than the files they contained; one forty-megabyte drive on display in the lobby originally retailed for twenty thousand dollars. Advances in storage density, and the digitization of everything from filing taxes to laying out magazines, changed this calculus. “It was like two crossing lines,” Jay Hagan, who co-founded DriveSavers, later told me. “The cost of drives was going down, and the value of data was going up.”Fittingly, the company emerged from the crash of a hard-drive manufacturer, Jasmine Technologies, where Hagan met his co-founder, Scott Gaidano. In 1989, they established DriveSavers as a repair service for their former employer’s abandoned customers, whom they quickly realized were more concerned about their files than their hardware. “I came up with this theorem,” Steve Burgess, a data- recovery pioneer who sold his own company to the duo, told me. “The value of a person’s data is negatively correlated with whether or not they have it. Once they have it, it really wasn’t worth anything. But, if they don’t have it, it’s worth an arm and a leg and their children.”Recovering data from an iPhone or a hard drive can set you back three thousand dollars, and from an enterprise server, six figures.

Although DriveSavers has a “no data, no charge” policy for most customers, it gets accused of overcharging by scrappier competitors, who tend to attribute the company’s success to attention-grabbing stunts. (One rival has mocked DriveSavers’ engineers as “clowns in spacesuits,” alluding to the protective gear they wear in ads.) But Farrell insists that the fees reflect care and determination. She once spent a week recovering an iPad for a couple with an autistic child who was so attached to a farming simulator that he couldn’t calm down without it. “They still invite me to barbecues,” she said. There have also been litigants who’ve lost their evidence; scientists, their research; the bereaved, their dearly departed’s final words.“I told him the hat rack is decorative.”Cartoon by Lonnie MillsapDriveSavers’ own death has been foretold many times. The cloud was supposed to destroy them; before that, it was commercial backup services, solid-state drives (SSDs), and encrypted smartphone hardware. Still, people keep finding ways to imperil their files, which grow ever more numerous and irreplaceable. Our precarious datasphere extends from cryptocurrency to telemedicine; now, with the advent of virtual companions, it’s even possible to lose the love of your life to a glitch.Technological progress may be increasing our exposure. A.I. agents are becoming notorious for accidental deletions, while the proliferation of data centers has wildly inflated the cost of storage. And, despite exponential growth in capacity, the average hard drive’s life span remains just under seven years. Considering the hundreds of zettabytes of data estimated to exist in the world, it’s as though a million Libraries of Alexandria were saved from annihilation solely by hamsters on wheels.Perhaps this is why I found it so soothing to be among the Diskasters, whose data, after all, had survived. I’d sent my phone ahead of me, and the tour had kindled a cautious optimism about its fate. One vitrine contained a decapitated Mac PowerBook 100, which had spent three days underwater; next to it, for emphasis, a taxidermied piranha bared its teeth. All these devices had escaped the maw of oblivion.

Why should mine be any different?The PowerBook had belonged to a couple of jugglers, Tony Duncan and Jaki Reis, who nearly lost it on a cruise down the Amazon in March, 1993. They were performers on the Ocean Princess, where they juggled swords and torches after dinner. One afternoon, they were practicing as the Princess left Belém, in northeastern Brazil, and promptly hit a sunken wreck. They helped the crew evacuate the ship and were safe in a hotel by nightfall. But they neglected to retrieve their PowerBook, which held their contacts, promotional materials, and financial records. “Everything was on that computer,” Reis told me. “I couldn’t leave it behind.”Reis talked her way onto a crew member’s unofficial salvage expedition. Back on the Princess, whose lower decks had sunk below the waterline, she waded down a corridor with a flashlight in her mouth, trying not to think about piranhas. She found the laptop fully submerged and assumed that it couldn’t be resuscitated but brought it back with her anyway. “I’m an Apple person,” she explained. Four repair services turned down the case. Then Duncan saw an ad for DriveSavers: “They were, like, ‘Doesn’t seem likely, but what the hell?’ ” Miraculously, they succeeded, and began exhibiting the PowerBook in an aquarium at the annual Macworld trade show. “We should have negotiated for dividends,” Duncan said.Many such resurrections take place in DriveSavers’ “clean room,” an E.R.-like space equipped with fans and HEPA filters which reminded me of where the Oompa Loompas operate Wonkavision. Before entering, I walked across an adhesive mat that tore the dust from my soles, then donned a mask, gloves, and white coveralls. The room had about eighty computers, which, because of the controlled environment, could safely run in their birthday suits, their bare motherboards mounted to the walls. Monitors showed digits scrolling in columns as repaired hard-disk drives (HDDs) were imaged; others waited in red and blue bins. Phil Reynolds, an engineer, showed me to a table where a four-terabyte drive lay open. “You got a firm grip?” he asked.It was about the size of a paperback novel, with smooth, reflective disks nestled inside.