Psychologist Consoles Data Loss Victims

(ok.whatever) writes "A former suicide prevention counselor is employed full-time by a data recovery firm to console its callers. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: 'When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place.' Good grief!"

Comments

It does hurt!

[Nazmun]

Just a year ago, i transferred all of my important data to a new IBM HD. I was pressed for space at the time so i deleted my old copies in the older. Within 2 months that hard drive died and took all of my precious data with it.

5 years of my life, all GONE! It was quite depressing really. Since then i have vowed to never buy a IBM hd or any IBM products ever again (not because they'll fail again, but just because they killed my data!!!)

*shrug*

[strider44]

When they see the bill for being on the line of tech support getting councilled for an hour after "clearly losing it", they'd definitely crack!

Re:Change a suicidal mind in less than half an hou

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a fair amount of writing on this subject on the net, which you can find if you google about a bit. Suicidal intent is a crisis, and crises pass quickly (one way or another). As someone who once stood on the wrong side of the safety railing I can say anecdotally that half an hour is just enough time to change your mind (and in my case, keep it that way).

The study of suicide really marks the beginning of empirical sociology and even psychology (Durkheim). Check it out, it's pretty cool.

Sometimes, if you wait long enough...

[BlueUnderwear]

... the hard drive just magically comes back to life.

Last year, bought a Seagate drive (yes I know....), copied all my stuff to the new drive, and reclaimed the old one for other stuff. And indeed, 3 month after having it, my brand new Seagate died on me. Of course I had no backup (yes I know...). I was shattered.

Tried contacting data recovery services. However, not only were they rather expensive, but also they did not guarantee confidentiality (in their customer agreement, they reserved themselves the right to make "good" use of the data if they stumbled across sth interesing...). Well, there were some pretty personal data on the disk (in 12 years, you do accumulate stuff), so this did make me somewhat uneasy.

Finally, a friend of mine told me that just letting the drive rest for a couple of week may bring it back. So, I just put it away, waited 4 weeks, reconnected it, and presto! everything was back! Sometimes lady luck is your friend! Of course, first thing I did was copy everything over to my new brand new raid array of Maxtors: You never know when it will fail again.

pgp

[qute]

I recently lost(forgot) my pgp key. I had a lot of stuff encrypted of personal value. No it wasn't childporn.

I finally got gpg hacked so I could brute my password. If anybody want in just mail me :-)

I just need to make some kind of phone-home ability. So each instance will tell "mother" which segment of the key-space it has searched.

That's one way of dealing with it...

Ironically I had backup's of both the data and my secret key. But not my password.

my happy place

[alizard]

- Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place.' Good grief!"

Personally, I prefer to find my happy place after a drive crash in a backup mirror drive in a mobile rack which doesn't get plugged in until I find that the rest of the computer is OK. Though the counselor actually is hot.

Get a suicidal mind off the phone in less than hal

[BlueUnderwear]

Also bear in mind that, according to the article, the "candidates" usually don't call back, for one reason or another. Which means that the counseling hotline doesn't actually know whether they were successful or not...

Lost dissertations

[SgtChaireBourne]

At one student job, we used to do some data recovery on the side. I used to encourage people to keep at least one back up even for small things. Many protested against the need for a backup, often countering with, "no need, I've used this disk [in my front pocket|loose in my backpack|in my sandwich bag] nearly every day for three years and it has never lost a file"

We used to get lots of people who lost papers, short assignments and occasionally a term paper or article. We even recovered a few theses. However, we never encountered someone that lost a dissertation. I always figured that those that did, just jumped of a roof or something.

Re:Lost dissertations

[jburroug]

I used to get cases like that all the time when I was working in the labs at my Uni many moons ago. Most of the time it was just undergrads losing some generic paper but one time I had a guy who lost a month's worth of work on his Masters thesis that was stored on the floppy he'd had since he was an undergrad... He handled it surprisingly well. When he first came into my office (the lab in the library actually had an office for the support dweeb, cool huh? That's the only time I've ever had an office at any job...) he was all pale looking and panicy when he explained what happened and what was on the disk. I calmly took the disk and told him to sit down and I'd see what I could do. The disk was toast of course all his data was gone. He sorta got this blank shell-shocked look on his face and just wandered out of the lab.

I also had one girl come in who broke down and started sobbing uncontrollably when I told her her disk was a goner. She just started balling and didn't stop for five or ten minutes I had to shut the office door and try to comfort her (I was all of 18 at the time and had virtually no experience dealing with girls at all, much less crying ones) I had to stand there while she held on to me and cried for a bit. Sadly at this point I was still too much of an awkward geek-boy to take advantage of this opportunity, I probably could've gotten at least a date that weekend if I'd asked.

The absolute worst data-loss reaction in the labs I ever saw was also one I exacerbated by not reacting well. This older guy (40's) was having problems saving his paper to his disk and came into the office and asked for my help. I grabbed a new floppy from my desk and went out to help him get it saved to the new disk. At the time our lab had a mix of macs and pc's. I don't remember the model but one particular series of powermac at the time ('96) had it's power button right where the floppy eject button is on a PC. When we got to the machine this dude was working on I asked him to eject his disk and before I could stop him he hit the power button and of course lost everything he'd done that day! I made the mistake of laughing when he did this. I caught myself quickly but it was too late he'd heard and was PISSED. He started screaming and ranting about computers, the Uni in general, me, Macs etc... Then demmanded that I get his disk out of the fucking computer for him, which I did, and as soon as I gave it to him he crushed it in hand and threw it against the wall and stormed out.

On the whole I liked the crying girl the best :)

Re:I have dealt with DriveSavers before...

[retro128]

Feh. Not to troll, but my own experience with DriveSavers has been, well, not so good. We had a drive go bad in a customer's server once, of course they had no backups, and all their accounting and business data on it. DriveSavers to the rescue, right? Wrong. Turns out the drive had a head crash in the FAT region and the drive had never been defragged, so what it came down to is that we were charged a couple grand for a CDR full of corrupt data. w00t.

Salvation came from a most unlikely place. Turns out that a secretary who they had fired only a few months ago had used the backup program that comes with Windows to archive the entire server drive on to her local machine. The data was 4 months out of date, but it beat the hell out of starting from scratch.