Mora Black’s reliable, mission-critical Windows laptop crashed, and she lost all her data. She is self-employed, so she was devastated, not having backed up her drive.

Local tech support in Albuquerque (not the end of the world) took several hundred dollars of her hard-earned cash, with no positive results whatsoever. Mora mentioned this in passing, as part of an email message asking for a copy of a contract I had downloaded months ago from her web site.

I directed her to DriveSavers, the premier data recovery service. You can learn about this California company here and in a recent New York Times feature. Make sure you read the conclusion of this article, where DriveSavers’ founder admits to never backing up his own computers. No comment.

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