DriveSavers Rescues P&H Creative Group’s 100-Year History

Bruce Hettema, the owner of P&H Creative Group, experienced a critical data loss situation that jeopardized the company’s historical images dating back to 1926 and valuable client data. After facing mounting issues with his Mac system and backup drive, Bruce turned to DriveSavers for data recovery assistance. The expert data recovery engineers at DriveSavers successfully recovered the data, including important historical archives, preserving the folder structure and file integrity.

My name is Bruce Hettema, and I’m the owner of P&H Creative Group. P&H is a Sonoma County based advertising, design, and web firm. P&H Creative Group is proud to be celebrating our 100th year in business. And, no, I’m not that old.

They were then based in San Francisco, and they were the largest art service on the West Coast, working for clients such as Levi’s, Bank of America, Matson, Dollar Steamship, Southern Pacific Railroad, Dole, and Del Monte, just to name a few.

All of our work here at P&H is done on a Mac, and I had noticed that my computer was getting sluggish, and I thought it was overloaded. So I removed all the critical files from it and moved it to an external drive where I kept all my backups. Computer still experienced problems, and then the backup drive started to not mount. It was then that everything kind of crashed and I couldn’t get anything to come back up again. And realized I was in a shitload of trouble.

I lost all my in-progress client files as well as jobs that we had done for them in the past. In addition, I had lost 20 years’ worth of research I had done on the history of the firm of documenting advertisements, work that we had done in the past. It was basically all gone. I had, uh, interviewed artists, some in their 80s and 90s who had worked for the firm. I had audio files, I had video files of them that were lost. Quite a few of them, including Amado Gonzalez here, Charlie Allen, Stan Galley who’s in the Illustration Hall of Fame, Chet Patterson, the original, my original mentor, who had all this vast knowledge of the history of the firm. All those audio and visual files were gone.

I initially worked with MacAdvantage, a local Sonoma County firm I had worked with before when I had issues with my computer. It was they that referred me to DriveSavers, and thank God they did. I can’t say enough about how professional and organized DriveSavers is. I got all my files back exactly as I had organized them, exactly as they were named, and it was like I had never lost a thing.

Absolutely, I would recommend DriveSavers to anybody who has experienced data loss or computer issues.

Read the P&H Creative Group Case Study.