Ashes to Ashes

By Wayne Maruna

I got a call from a client who runs a business here in town and has a second place further east.  The second place had a fire a few months ago.  Unfortunately he had a laptop that fell victim to the fire.  He asked if I would look at it and see if there was any way I could salvage data from the hard drive.  I told him I could not promise anything, but I would do my best.

When he handed it over to me, it was wrapped in heavy plastic sealed shut with duct tape.  I got it home and opened it in the garage.  As soon as I pulled it out of the plastic wrap, I knew it had been in a serious fire, first because of the strong smell of smoke, and second because my hands were immediately black from soot.  On went the rubber gloves. The case had been badly deformed by the heat, and much of the case was charred.  As I handled it, black flakes fell off. I tried to open the laptop but the hinges were too deformed to function.  Still, from what little I could see, the screen looked to be intact, far more intact than my hopes for any data salvaging.

A laptop hard drive is small – about 4” by 2-3/4” by ¼” thick. With salsa, you could consume it in a couple of bites if it were not made of steel and a printed circuit board. I removed the hard drive from the bottom of the case and found the steel side that faces out was covered with thick brown smoke residue which I wiped off as best I could with a cloth.  Amazingly, the underside of the drive, the printed circuit board where all the electronics are exposed, looked perfectly clean.

I put it into my hard drive docking station which allowed me to plug the drive into my spare computer via USB cable. Imagine my amazement when a little window popped out of the side of my screen asking what I wanted to do with the drive.  I told it to show me the files, and sure enough it did.  I found over 20GB of pictures, another 20GB+ of music, and several megabytes of documents and downloads, all told over 56GB of data – that’s a lot!  I needed a 64GB flash drive to capture all that stuff, but I did not have one.  I could have saved a few bucks and some time by ordering a drive from Amazon and have it arrive in two days, but I decided to make the trek to Staples and pay a few more bucks to secure the flash drive, because I did not want to take a chance on shutting down the docking station and finding myself not so lucky the second time.  By the time I copied everything of value off, I had only 3.5GB free on that 64GB flash drive.

My compliments to the folks at Toshiba whose sooty label was on the hard drive.

The owner was very unfortunate to experience the fire, but very lucky to have had his data salvaged.

How about you?  You feelin’ lucky? Well, are ya’?

For my own part, I subscribe to the lyrics that say “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all”. Don’t rely on luck.  At a minimum, back up your data.  Even better, do an image backup of your entire hard drive to an external hard drive on a periodic basis. Well known programs used for disk imaging include Macrium Reflect (www.macrium.com), Acronis True Image (www.acronis.com), and Easeus Todo (www.easeus.com).  Free versions are offered by both Macrium and Easeus. You can find visual tutorials for each on YouTube.