Hard drives are the collective memories of our cleverest machines, the indispensable intellects of the information age. Yet Scott Gaidano, 58, president of DriveSavers, detests them. Most any data-storage device is, to his mind, a ridiculous piece of machinery. Ask him why, and he will pound his desk with frustration as he tells you how obscenely sensitive it is: a hunk of metal whirring around at 10,000 r.p.m. that dies if you drop it from 5 ft. The more we store on them--these days, everything from tax records to baby pictures--the more painful their death.
Gaidano's loathing for storage media stems from a lost batch of electronic love letters. Back in 1984, when he was working for a company called Jasmine Technologies, he and his buddies used to go water-skiing on weekends, taking their first-generation Macintoshes and trading software. Gaidano still remembers that sinking feeling the weekend he booted up his Mac and saw the sad-face icon, indicating all was not well with the single floppy disc inside. Every precious byte, including all Gaidano's romantic correspondence, was gone. "I was all freaked out," he says. "Nobody could tell me what to do to recover it"--not even his government contacts.
Gaidano still has that floppy, framed, in his office. The data have not been recovered. But this nightmarish experience, familiar to many, put Gaidano on the road to creating a very profitable company. Data-storage devices, he knew, were getting larger every year. While the maximum size of a disc drive in 1984 was 30 MB, today a 120-GB hard drive--that's 400 times as much storage--sells for less than $120. But the basic technology has changed little, so the amount of lost data swells each year. That's why Gaidano and partner Jay Hagan created DriveSavers, which has become one of the most respected small private companies you've never heard of--with $10 million annual revenue and 40 well-compensated employees.
Sitting on the edge of a marsh outside the town of Novato, 20 miles north of San Francisco, DriveSavers cultivates a low-key image. There is no sign on the firm's office building and no obvious front door. DriveSavers does a lot of business with the more secretive branches of government, which, Gaidano says, prefer that his firm keep a low profile.
Inside, however, the walls are plastered with signed photos from grateful clients. There's Sean Connery, who opened his laptop on a plane one day and found that its hard drive had somehow managed to erase itself; Sting, who briefly lost the records of how much he was worth; and stumble-prone President Gerald Ford, who dropped his laptop. A computer retrieved from a burning house is on display, as is one crushed under the wheels of a shuttle bus and another rescued from a cruise ship that sank to the bottom of the Amazon. As with more than 90% of the drives that come here, the data from each of these machines were recovered.