Back up your data!

About a year ago I had a client lose all their pictures on the Hard drive f their home PC. They did not have backups and all the computer tools a typical tech guy has would not work. I had to send this out to a company that specializes in data recovery - in the end it cost $2000 and they got back ALL the data.

Recently, this happened again to another client who list their financial data in quicken. They certainly did not want to shell out $2,000 - I was hoping I could start putting the skills I have been developing in HTCIA to use. I met with the Computer Forensics Investigator for the SLO PD - he showed me plenty of tools - lucky for me this was not an easy recovery so there was alot for me to watch. In the end I was able to recover the Quicken data and have used these skills more than once on other hard drives.

Please, backup your data - and also be careful with what you store and transmit digitally.