Last week, I was at the PhotoPlus show where we always hear horror stories about data
loss (the guy whose internal hard drive died, causing him to try to revive it so he can get
his 10 years of data; someone else who is spending thousands of dollars to get client images
from a failed drive; one photographer telling another about the wedding photos he lost).
There's no shortage of accounts from those who learn the hard way about maintaining backup
discipline.

Today's case is a little different but is an account of the unexpected and unwanted data
disaster striking at the wrong time, but in the right place. Our James Wiebe is delivering
a talk at the Dutch Cybercrime Conference taking place this week in Arnhem and earlier today,
minutes before Vincent Everts was to deliver his keynote speech to nearly 500 digital
investigators, his computer crashed. Derrick Donnelly of BlackBag Technologies happened to
be on hand to team up with James--Derrick quickly took the Mac laptop apart and retrieved the
SSD, which James connected to a WiebeTech Forensic UltraDock v5, which in turn was connected
to another laptop, just in time for Vincent to give his talk.

A fabulous outcome to a potential disaster and Vincent's relief ("You saved my life!") is quite evident
in the videos below.

While it's hard to ensure that your data disaster occurs when James and Derrick are around, it's
a cautionary tale about having some way to get back in action should your primary data source up
and quit on you.