I keep having Quincy flashbacks when I think of this. But hey, even hard drives need a trip to the ER sometimes!

He knew it was important, but backing up his hard drive was the last thing on Ryan Risdal’s mind. Mr. Risdal, 35, was too busy rearing four children and caring for his ill wife.

One day after her death last August, Mr. Risdal was trying to recover some pictures from his computer to display at his wife’s funeral. But the computer would not cooperate, and the local repair shop told him he was out of luck. The drive was inoperable, and nothing could be retrieved.

“I had six years of digital pictures on the drive, and I hadn’t backed up in years,” said Mr. Risdal, a maintenance supervisor in Grass Valley, Calif., in the Gold Rush country northeast of Sacramento.

According to those in the data recovery business, computer users who think they can escape Mr. Risdal’s fate are mistaken. “Eventually, every hard drive will fail,” some even within months, said Todd Johnson, vice president for operations at OnTrack Data Recovery (www.ontrack.com), a firm specializing in recovering digital files.

The local repair shop referred Mr. Risdal to DriveSavers (www.drivesavers.com), another company offering data retrieval from hard drives, flash memory, diskettes and optical media. After several days’ work, DriveSavers had recovered his entire photo library. [Read the rest]