Technological Miracles

An amazing headline today:

Data from Columbia disk drives survived the shuttle accident

The headline is only partly true. In reality the drive was sent to a company called Kroll Ontrack in the western Minneapolis suburbs. The engineer there, Jon Edwards, managed to work his miracle on some of the data. Much of the data on other drives was lost due to the incredible heat that not only melted parts but also demagnetized them.

This news doesn't entirely surprise me, especially with Kroll Ontrack. Last fall I put my CD of pictures from our 2002 trip to Spain in the drive- and got an error message. Something somewhere on the CD was messed up and all those great and wonderful once-in-a-lifetime pictures seemed lost forever.

Then I found a business card on a bulletin board at a local coffee shop. It was for a sales person for Kroll Ontrack. To make the story short I called, took the CD in, paid a pretty good fee and Voila! there were my pictures again. All of them. It isn't cheap. These kind of guys get paid well for their magic. But I'm not sure how important the data from Columbia is, but my pictures were, to me, priceless.