Julian Lucas sets out to recover the contents of two hard drives that may hold traces of his late father. In the process, he effectively becomes an intern at DriveSavers, a “hard-disk heaven,” where he surveys an archive of elaborate technological wreckage and squints through a repair tutorial, laboring under watchful eyes to repair “a chip no bigger than a peppercorn,” in a scene reminiscent of a hospital drama.
Their handiwork was on display in the lobby’s Museum of Bizarre Diskasters, an exhibition of silicon carnage. “I remember opening this one out on the deck,” Cobb said of an ancient Toshiba laptop, which had burned shut in a fire. “It was like an oyster.” One successfully recovered smartphone had been shredded by a snowblower. Another had been sliced in two by a monorail, like a magician’s assistant. The company regularly buys brand-new devices and tears them to pieces. “It’s like the jaws of life,” Cobb said. “If a car gets absolutely demolished, you need to know what to cut and what not to cut.”
More picks about saving, storing, and moving data
Century-Scale Storage
“If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?”
Your Data’s Strange Undersea Voyage
“The internet is a series of tubes. In the ocean.”
The Race to Save our Online Lives from a Digital Dark Age
“We’re making more data than ever. What can—and should—we save for future generations? And will they be able to understand it?”
