Kroll Ontrack
Aaron
Photo credit: Aaron
Kroll Ontrack is a company with the specific goal of recovering memory from damaged, crashed or in any way corrupted computer hard drives. And they do a great job, lucky for us.
Unfortunately, our family had one such crashed hard drive — our beloved Mac Powerbook G4 finally gave up the disk — before we had backed up all the, ah ... family photos. We fretted, we searched for duplicates, we crossed our fingers. Finally we took the plunge and signed on with Kroll to extract our memories from the computer. What a relief!
We were greeted at the main desk and given name tags for our pre-arranged tour, then ushered into a small conference room where we were given free pens, notepads and bouncy balls! Computer scientists really know how to live!
After they introduced themselves, the amiable and chatty computer scientists who were our guides showed us rooms full of whirring, fridge-sized computers, banks and banks full of servers and monitoring stations. It was really impressive. At one workstation, they showed us a dizzying screen of computer output and how just one wrong symbol can crash the works. It's amazing it doesn't happen more often, really. They then took us back to our original conference room where we were treated to sodas, chips and apple cobbler! Again we note: Computer scientists really know how to live — and work!
The tour itself was really interesting. On top of that, this company has a great knowledge of how to attract customers or gain a fanbase: loads upon loads of free stuff — and then as if that isn't enough, add to that the amusing and educational videos they showed of true life computer crashes. Like Baked Laptop. Truly. A couple went on vacation, and because they were worried about burglars, they stashed their laptop in the oven. When they arrived back several weeks later — famished — at their apartment, they flipped on the kitchen lights and preheated the oven to 350 degrees F. Judging from the looks of Baked Laptop, that's the wrong temperature.
Points we learned. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER and:
1. Do not bake your computer in an oven to hide it from burglars.
2. Do not put magnets near or on your computer. This may be common knowledge, but plenty of people pop the ol' dentist office number fridge magnet in their computer cases anyway.
3. Do not place a hard drive in a spaceship, blow the spaceship up and bury the hard drive at the bottom of a Texas lakebed. Kroll Ontrack was in charge of gathering data from the mud-clogged hard drive from the ill-fated Challenger spacecraft, and amazingly extracted the data!
Hope this helps you keep your disks whirring and your memories intact!
Unfortunately, our family had one such crashed hard drive — our beloved Mac Powerbook G4 finally gave up the disk — before we had backed up all the, ah ... family photos. We fretted, we searched for duplicates, we crossed our fingers. Finally we took the plunge and signed on with Kroll to extract our memories from the computer. What a relief!
We were greeted at the main desk and given name tags for our pre-arranged tour, then ushered into a small conference room where we were given free pens, notepads and bouncy balls! Computer scientists really know how to live!
After they introduced themselves, the amiable and chatty computer scientists who were our guides showed us rooms full of whirring, fridge-sized computers, banks and banks full of servers and monitoring stations. It was really impressive. At one workstation, they showed us a dizzying screen of computer output and how just one wrong symbol can crash the works. It's amazing it doesn't happen more often, really. They then took us back to our original conference room where we were treated to sodas, chips and apple cobbler! Again we note: Computer scientists really know how to live — and work!
The tour itself was really interesting. On top of that, this company has a great knowledge of how to attract customers or gain a fanbase: loads upon loads of free stuff — and then as if that isn't enough, add to that the amusing and educational videos they showed of true life computer crashes. Like Baked Laptop. Truly. A couple went on vacation, and because they were worried about burglars, they stashed their laptop in the oven. When they arrived back several weeks later — famished — at their apartment, they flipped on the kitchen lights and preheated the oven to 350 degrees F. Judging from the looks of Baked Laptop, that's the wrong temperature.
Points we learned. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER and:
1. Do not bake your computer in an oven to hide it from burglars.
2. Do not put magnets near or on your computer. This may be common knowledge, but plenty of people pop the ol' dentist office number fridge magnet in their computer cases anyway.
3. Do not place a hard drive in a spaceship, blow the spaceship up and bury the hard drive at the bottom of a Texas lakebed. Kroll Ontrack was in charge of gathering data from the mud-clogged hard drive from the ill-fated Challenger spacecraft, and amazingly extracted the data!
Hope this helps you keep your disks whirring and your memories intact!
Photo credit: Aaron