Lost Data? Call a Counselor

4:15 PM -- When folks turn to DriveSavers Data Recovery, they don't just get help restoring data from damaged drives. They get emotional assistance.

"People get upset over lost data, whether it's baby pictures or your presentation for next week," says Kelly Chessen, data crisis counselor at DriveSavers. Her job is to calm them down.

Once, it took her nearly 30 minutes to get an SMB owner to stop yelling long enough to order DriveSavers' service. "His emotions came out through anger," she said. Then there was the young mother who lost all her baby's infancy photos when the home computer tanked. (In both instances, DriveSavers is working on restoral, with positive results so far, Chessen says.)

DriveSavers, which announced this week that despite its best efforts, it couldn't restore drives wiped clean with Fujitsu degaussers, also puts Chessen in touch with corporate IT groups. (See Data Demolition.) Here, IT pros may be consumed with fear that losing data means losing their jobs -- not an unrealistic worry when you've lost the corporate email server.

"I try to give them hope and some evidence of our high success rate," says Chessen, who formerly worked as a suicide prevention hot line manager.DriveSavers doesn't charge customers for Chessen's service.

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch