CES 2015

With more and more music and video being stored by consumers on external hard-disks, those disks have themselves become valuable commodities. You’d think someone who took time to rip an entire CD and/or DVD collection, or downloaded a boatload of high-res albums from HDtracks, would make the additional step to secure their data by backing it up. But in many situations that isn’t the case.

Drive Savers is a company with decades of experience in resurrecting dead drives, and in recovering valuable data for clients ranging from Lucasfilm to regular folks who accidentally dropped their laptop into the bathtub. At Storage Visions, a satellite conference happening alongside CES, Drive Savers was touting a new relationship with Sandisk that would make it easier to retrieve data from that company’s solid-state disk drives, along with its extensive menu of data recovery services. Given the prospect of re-ripping my entire CD collection (yeah, I’m one of those lazy sods who lacks a comprehensive backup of my audio/video data) or contacting Drive Savers, I’d probably opt for the latter.