Level 3

The saga of the lost chapters continues. My computer hard drive, which suddenly ceased all vital functions several days ago, has been sent to a data retrieval center. I received a call today which I hoped would bring news that my files had been recovered. Instead, I found out that my drive needs to be moved up to Level 3. Apparently whatever they do at Level 1 and Level 2 were not sufficient to retrieve my data.

So now my disk and lost chapter are on their way to Level 3, where I believe they will dismantle the hard drive in a clean room in order to retrieve the data in some other non-specified manner. The time frame for Level 3 is two weeks. It is going to cost the maximum amount, but if all goes well, I will get my chapters.

I am holding out hope. Almost everybody I’ve talked to says that short of catastrophic physical damage it should be possible to retrieve the data. One friend cited a case where the drive had been in a fire and they still retrieved the data. And did you know that Department of Defense only considers data non-retrievable after a hard disk has been completely reformatted seven times. Seven times.

Yes, there is still hope.