Bruce Hettema, the owner and president of P&H Creative Group, faced a severe data loss situation. The company, which had a rich advertising history dating back to 1926 as Patterson & Hall (later Patterson & Sullivan), relied heavily on Mac systems for its advertising and design work. Initially, Bruce noticed his computer’s performance declining, leading him to believe it was overloaded. He decided to transfer critical files to an external drive for backup. However, the problems persisted, and the backup drive eventually failed to mount, resulting in a catastrophic data loss.

The data loss included in-progress client files, past project work, and 20 years’ worth of research and images documenting the history of the firm, including interviews with artists, audio files, video files, and original art files. This loss was not only devastating to ongoing business but also meant losing valuable historical records.

Bruce initially sought help from MacAdvantage, a local Sonoma County computer repair company he had worked with previously. MacAdvantage, a DriveSavers partner, referred him to DriveSavers, recognizing that expert data recovery skills were required to address the extent of the data loss.