The shelves are full of hard drives waiting their turn to be interrogated. In most cases, they will give up most of the information their owners want, but only after a little tender loving care so the patient can “talk.”

Ontrack Data Recovery extracts information from drives that have crashed, been burned, crushed or in a flood, and transfers the data to a new drive for the customer.

One caution for wet drives - kept them moist; don't try to dry them out yourself.

Hubert King, the Engineering Manager for Ontrack’s Reston, VA office, explains: "We have our proprietary methods that allow us to go in and clean up things, sanitize it, to allow us to be able to extract that data. If it's wet, then it gives us a better chance of getting a good solid recovery as opposed to it's been dried out, maybe a salt deposit, you have corrosion that has gotten into the drive."

King says he's seen a 20 percent increase in laptop hard drives coming in, and a lot of digital storage as well. Data from flash drives and other non-mechanical storage is easier to recover than hard drives that write data to a “surface.” "If that (hard drive) crashes maybe we'll be able to get 75-85 percent of the data because the surface has crashed. Whereas in the micro drives, the chips, we should be able to get 100 percent on those."

Kip Komack is in charge of Ontrack’s clean room, where the things that hold our data are taken apart, cleaned, parts substituted to make drives come to life again. Then the drive is hooked up to a computer and the little ones and zeros that make up our pictures, our video, and our documents are retrieved.

Komack says that while hard drives still make up most of the work, SD and CompactFlash memory cards are coming in as people drop cameras, or get the cards wet, their vacation pictures suddenly “gone.”

The same is true for the small USB flash or “thumb” drives people carry. Their enemies are dirt and breakage. "What mostly happens is they get dirty. The components inside get wet as well, spill a drink on it, drop it in the pool, things like that. So wet is bad, dirt is bad, and any force that will break the device," says Komack. The job is the same, but the variety of storage is changing. That takes new approaches and new tools. As long as we don’t both backing up our data, companies like Ontrack Data Recovery will remain very busy.