Q: Some irreplaceable information (photos, genealogy data and tax information) was deleted from my CenturyLink e-mail by a technical problem. The company says that all my information is gone and can't be restored. But I've heard that information isn't really "lost" because it's still on a backup drive. I've even offered to pay CenturyLink to find the information.
Is my data really lost, or doesn't CenturyLink want to recover it for cost reasons?
Janet Ikola, Richfield
A: All data centers regularly back up their servers to another disk drive, and restoring a server from a backup isn't difficult. So I think CenturyLink would recover your data if it could do so at a reasonable cost.
The unanswered question is, why might the company be unable to recover your data, or at least not at a reasonable cost? There are several possible reasons, but here's one example.
The data could have been lost when an e-mail server's disk drive suffered a "head crash." That's when the data read-write device that normally floats above the disk suddenly drops, striking the disk and destroying part of the disk's data. If the damage were not immediately discovered, a backup of that server would probably contain no data.
Here's where cost could become a factor. Even in a head crash, some data survives. But the only way to recover it is to pay thousands of dollars to have it plucked piecemeal from the damaged disk. A data center operator might decide that wasn't worth the cost.
Regardless of what happened, CenturyLink isn't under any legal obligation to recover your lost data.
