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The panicked hundreds who call every week don't know that, of course. All they know is that their precious information has disappeared. So if the operator (no voice-mail hell here) detects a note of agitation in your voice, she'll put you through to Kelly Chessen, 29, the company's data-crisis counselor. Kelly will not tell customers her title or that her last job was managing a suicide hot line in nearby Napa Valley. But that experience is more useful than you might imagine. "Sometimes people say that when their computer crashed, they wanted to throw it and themselves out of the window," says Chessen. "That's when I ask if they're actually thinking about committing suicide. Most of the time it's an idle threat."
Occasionally it's a little more serious. There was the FORTUNE 500 executive from Kansas City, Kans., who called on a Friday afternoon: the server with all his company's financial information had died, and the backup tape turned out to be blank. He was on the next plane to San Francisco with the server's hard drive--and while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge thought to himself, "If this doesn't work out, it's a one-way trip." This required a step beyond data-crisis counseling. While engineers took the executive's drive apart and got it spinning again, Gaidano took him on a Napa winery tour. Sampling the merchandise seemed to help.
More often, Chessen is dealing with simple embarrassment. Like the business owner who could not face what he had done to his computer and got his secretary to make the call. Trouble was, she could not describe the problem. Finally, Chessen got the boss on the phone and teased out the truth: in a moment of frustration, he had pulled out a gun and shot the central processing unit.
Across the corridor from those star-studded signed portraits are fire safes filled with just about every hard-drive spare part that has ever existed--many of which can't be found even at the manufacturing company. DriveSavers is the only data-recovery firm licensed by all the major hard-drive makers, like Toshiba and Western Digital, meaning you can use its services without breaking the drive's warranty. This began when former manufacturer Micropolis had hard-drive failures in its own office and had to sheepishly admit it was unable to fix its own creations. Gaidano was there to help.
Restorations take place down the corridor, in an airtight clean room where engineers wear space-age bunny suits. Once a drive is painstakingly picked apart, cleaned and put back together, its contents are copied onto a bank of 31 servers. Then the engineers match the jumbled data to file types. This gets harder as the number of file types on a drive increases. Two months ago, San Francisco Web designer Kathleen Craig lost a laptopful of media in dozens of formats, including her resume and wedding pictures. DriveSavers was able to return 80%--lower than average, but for Craig, who had reconciled herself to the loss, that was far better than nothing.