Saving Torched Data With DriveSavers

DANO WEIR: All right, guys, let's get started. I have a list here.

DANO WEIR: Just chill for a second, okay? Conan O'Brien, Will Ferrell, The Rolling Stones, Harrison Ford, Metallica, Buzz Aldrin, Motley Crew, Adam Sandler, some late greats, Jimmy Buffett, Sean Connery, President Gerald Ford.

DANO WEIR: We're all...

DANO WEIR: At one point in their life in the last 40 years up a creek and they called Drive Savers financial confidence for your hip pocket money is really good energy thanks for checking out It's All Money hey welcome to It's All Money powered by Sonoma Wealth Advisors my name is Daniel Weir Sonoma Wealth, we are a financial advisor in the town of Sonoma, and this show, It's All Money, is the story behind personal finance and business, and the stories behind the money, the stories behind those moments where you're caught in a jam, you go, wait, I didn't know that this was finance, and it actually is.

DANO WEIR: I am sitting in a conference room in Novato, California. I am looking at the Bell Marin Keys. It's beautiful.

DANO WEIR: And my guest today, if you've ever had that moment where that hard drive with everything you need failed, that cloud storage suddenly disappeared, or maybe you can't get to your crypto, you'll want to know about my guest today, the head of cyber recovery and the director of engineering, Andy Moss and Mike Cobb from DriveSavers. Welcome, guys. Thanks for being on the show.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us.

DANO WEIR: Okay, so what is this host even talking about, Andy? Because I got... My laptop, and I turn it on, all my stuff's on my laptop, and it's just, it's always going to be there, and there's no problem. So, what do you mean, lost my drive?

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah, it's a situation many people find themselves in where, unexpectedly, something doesn't work. And technology is imperfect. As many advancements as we've had over the last many years, stuff happens. Things break. And when you least expect it...

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And when you are least prepared for it sometimes as well. So whether it's your hard drive or your iPhone or it's your critical servers at work that store all your business information, no one ever plans to lose their data. But when they do, they need to have an answer.

DANO WEIR: It's the promise of technology and it's why so many people shove so much of their life into it. Is this promise of permanence? Until that moment, you're like, wait, what? I didn't even know this was possible.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Right. It's easy, easy to get access to your data or make access to your data.

DANO WEIR: And if it's part of your business, now you've got a financial problem.

DANO WEIR: Mike, you're the head of engineering. Give me an idea of the breadth of devices that DriveSavers works on. Just iPhones, just a couple of portable hard drives. I mean, what is the scope here?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I kind of like my eyes light up. It's like, oh, my gosh, well, whatever holds zeros and ones, whatever holds that digital data, that's what we recover from.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: So from, like I said, an iPhone, a smart device like an IPad, your hard drive, which is on your computer, servers, micro SD cards, video. I mean, just any type of device that holds data. A defibrillator. We've done a recovery for a forensic defibrillator. Yep, absolutely. For a court case.

DANO WEIR: What was the data on the defibrillator?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, they needed to know that it actually engaged properly at the right time, properly and things like that. Someone was like a malpractice or something like that? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, so any type of data that's on any device could need to have a recovery for whatever reason. Gps systems, you know, there's just so many more. Yeah, it's incredible.

DANO WEIR: And I mentioned all the celebrities at the start. We'll get to them a little bit later in the episode. But I want to talk about business owners right now because business owners. How much of your business is on a server? How much are your books worth? And Andy, talk to me about the value that a business owner might have to have DriveSavers as part of their continuity plan.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Sure. So first of all, every business owner, a best practice is insuring your business. It's a requirement and they always put a business insurance policy in place to protect their business against business interruption. Common practice.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Those business interruption policies attempt to cover and protect for the loss of either operational downtime or financial losses that might occur as a result of... Some disaster that happens to your business.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: So business continuity plans cover and disaster recovery plans, as we've called them in IT for 30, 40 years, cover disasters that you don't expect fires like we have in California, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes like we have in Minnesota. So, but the thing that has really come to the forefront in the last 10 years, especially are cyber attacks on businesses.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And so the average or your standard business insurance policy doesn't always include coverage for cyber. So what I've personally seen in the area that I specialize in here at DriveSavers is helping businesses recover from ransomware attacks.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And most of the work that we do is related to an insurance claim against that business interruption, but specifically they have a cyber policy. So...

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: For all the business owners that are listening or watching, they want to double check that they have cyber insurance riders or addendums or additions to their core business insurance policies. And ransomware attacks are unfortunately more prevalent today than they ever have been.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And operational downtime is the metric that the insurance companies use to measure the value of that business being down. So if you don't, if you haven't done your planning, it's hard to know how much it's going to cost you on a daily basis when your business is shut down and not operating. So, so that's where.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, even the whole business or part of the business, any part of that business could also be massive problems for that, for that business.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

DANO WEIR: So let's paint, let's, I want to stick on this too, because the hard drive catching on fire and you guys recovering it is sort of a. Like unfortunate accident.

DANO WEIR: The phone in the lake is an unfortunate accident, but this is the more nefarious angle that you guys are also able to help with. Can you paint me, either tell me an abstract or paint me a similar scenario of what a business ransomware attack looks like, either of you?

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah, I'll give you the quick, what we, so the term that we use in the industry is the incident response. And there are companies that, you know, consider it same thing as a first responder that you'd have on a fire situation.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Incident response the life cycle and digital forensics firms are a part of that companies that we partner with but from the first moment a company realizes that their systems have been encrypted they find a ransom note when they come to work on Monday morning on their systems it said your systems have been infected and you need to pay us the cyber criminals a ransom of x amount in order for us to send you the keys to unlock your systems that kind of shock and surprise is what unfortunately a lot of business owners experience.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: The life cycle itself at that point, that's what triggers the incident response from a cybersecurity perspective. And those are the companies that help out in a reactive services model where they help, first of all, establish communications with those, we call them threat actors, the cyber criminals, or the term is threat actors, establish communications, find out.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Is there a real risk to data that's been stolen from the company for that being released, whether that's personally identifiable information or personal health information, financial records, things like that?

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: They will also deploy forensics teams who collect images and start doing analysis on how the threat actors got into the network.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Or if they're still in.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Or if they're still in, they're also responsible for...

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Deploying software to secure and remediate those systems and clean them and get them back up and running. And it's not just the laptops or workstations that are deployed. It's the core servers that are running that business as well. And so those companies are the first phone call.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Usually they're recommended by an insurance company or a data privacy law firm. And then those companies are ones that we partner with and they call us when there are certain data sets. That are required for either operational purposes or compliance or regulatory reasons when the business continuity plan kicks in and they can't restore from backups.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: If there's data that's inaccessible for one reason or another, typically either deletion or corruption, and if they can't get access to those data sets, they call us. And that's where we come in as drives.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: And if you don't mind, so they don't get access to the data sets because the thread actors actually either encrypt those data sets. So they're, they're in your network.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: A lot of times for 30 days or more learning where you back up, what, what, you know, what the data sets are, where they go, how they run. And then they either encrypt the backups themselves or delete the backups. And so either way. The threat actor has made it so you only have the files that are encrypted. So you want to buy the decryptor or that's the only action you think you have.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: It's extortion. Yeah. That's how the ransom, the ransom game works. Yes. They're extorting. And that to your question is how you end up valuing the daily operation of your business. And a special point and advice to any business owner out there.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: If you have a business insurance policy. And a cyber insurance policy, do not keep an electronic copy of that policy where the threat actors can find it. Because just the other day, I was on a call where there was a business with about 50 employees that was impacted.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: All their systems were encrypted. They don't have a lot of cash flow, but the cyber criminals ransom demand, which was over seven figures, so over a million happened to match exactly what the business insurance policy coverage look like. And so they said, hey, we can't pay this. There's just no way. So we need Drive Savers help to see if we can get their data back.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: So don't keep your policies in the same place as everything else. Take it, put it on a thumb drive, put it in a safe, have a paper copy. Print it out. Whatever. Print it out. Yeah, yeah. We want to be eco-conscious, but definitely print out a copy of your policy and don't keep it in your office. Keep it at home or I have two copies or something like that.

DANO WEIR: You mentioned it a couple times in my research. I also found this, that people then called you. It feels like a little bit like you are the last line of defense or people's like, and then, I mean, you must have pulled off, and I saw an award out there for you for your 20 years here at the company.

DANO WEIR: I know now it's been 30. Oh, that was years ago. I know now it's been 30. 31. It seems like you've pulled off some moonshots for recoveries.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Oh, it's exciting. I mean, DriveSavers does over 15,000 recoveries a year.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: And so there's so many different people we've been able to help. And it never gets unexciting, or I'm not sure what to say. It is exciting to know that you helped the person who lost the data or the company lost the data to get back. We get reunited to that, whatever it is. It could be poetry. It could be music. It could be...

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: I mean, the whole business, it's incredible. It's really, really fun.

DANO WEIR: And part of that has been helping in the wildfires, which unfortunately have been happening in California. Specifically, the most recent, the Southern California fires. You want to talk a little bit about the work you did there?

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah, I'll touch on it. Mike can continue it. But yeah, Drive Savers at that time, obviously, as a 40-year-old California company, we cared deeply about helping people in California. We donated I think it was up to a million dollars worth of data recovery services to help people that have been impacted by the fires.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And in those cases, what we see are primarily home users. We've been helping consumers and home users for a very long time, but also small businesses, especially whose systems have been impacted. So if you have an example or two, that'd probably be good from the wildfires. For someone who actually lost their house in a wildfire, you could speak better to it than I can.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: For me, it was the Tubbs fire. 2017. And so we were able to help.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Luckily, our house was near the end of the fire. Now I lost everything. Our family lost everything in the fire, but we rebuilt. We have a great community around us, wonderful friends and family that helped pull us all together. The main thing is that there were some businesses we were able to help just down the street from us, where a lot of times we really, we need to have some luck on our side when it comes to wildfires.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Hopefully there's a first responder that gets some water, gets something to put that fire out, at least start to put it out, because there are times we're not going to be able to recover the data because the fire is going for hours on end at way too high of a degree.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: So anyway, I met a lot of the people specifically in the Tubbs fire and some others that have come up from some of the California fires where I meet them personally because it is personal to me.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: To be able to at least share our emotional experiences together, especially when it's a no recovery in those cases. So, and Andy knows, I mean, I get on the phone with customers all the time and it's because it is that personal touch that I've always liked.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: And so it is something that means something to me personally.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: It's frequent. If you see a fire damaged device, if it's a phone or a laptop or a computer, you know, any device, When you first see something that's been in a fire, it's almost impossible, to your point earlier, imagine that there is data that's recoverable off that device.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: If the particular chips that store the data on that device have not been too severely damaged. Despite what's happened around it, we have tools, and we'll show you a little bit later, machines that can help analyze the integrity, the structural integrity of that chip itself, and then be able to extract data from it. So the core lesson there is no matter how ugly it is. There may be a chance.

DANO WEIR: That's amazing.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah.

DANO WEIR: Describe for me some of the, because in order to do this work, you just touched on it.

DANO WEIR: Describe for me some of the gear you have in-house. I know you have an x-ray machine. And where does this all come from? How does this start? I mean, what's the story here?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, the story is we focus on data recovery. So all of the engineers, when we're faced with any device that comes in, we need to go, well, how does it work? And is there a way to affect change? Can we get it back to working or get it to extract the data set? So it comes from the idea that, well, we're the experts. What do we need to either get a recovery or prove that it can't be gotten?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Prove that the device won't give up that data. So that's really the mindset you have to be in. And again, 40 years we're celebrating right now.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: It's something that you, it's all we do.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Is recover data.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: If we wind the clock back though, like 40 years, it started with taking apart hard drives and fixing the pieces that were broken that were preventing access to the data on the drive. So what's amazing is how, and I started selling personal computers back in 1991.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: So back when a hard drive, I remember the first one gigabyte hard drive that came out, which was like the size of this thing on the table. It was $2,000 at the time. And now a gigabyte is like, Not enough storage to, well, for my PowerPoint presentations, they're bigger than a gig. So that's a different topic. But a very rich.

DANO WEIR: I got a 100 megabyte zip disk. Yeah, there you go. Whoa. Yeah, exactly.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Way back. So the equipment on the bench necessary to take apart those devices and then repair those devices is where it really began. And then what's really, I think, the accumulated knowledge over the years is there are two things. One's the physical.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: You know, understanding physically how those devices are built and how they store and write information to whether it's an SD card from your camera or a single hard drive that's in your laptop up to these giant storage systems that sit in the data centers that have hundreds and hundreds of hard drives and store tons of data.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: We had one with 170 hard drives. So 174 terabyte hard drives that all... Four terabyte hard drives. Yeah, all stacked together, you know, all different RAID configurations. I won't get technical, but the bottom line is this massive rack, and many of them went down at the same time. They're supposed to act as one device.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: So think of those 170 drives as one huge drive. Well, it started to fail. And so that was something that, I mean, that was a massive, there was at least seven different subgroups of this particular entity that All were down, all of their research, independent, you know, all down at the same time. It was a massive, massive problem for the company.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah. So you'd see the physical failures. And then what emerged as well is logically that data may be stored. Logically, all the data is stored like on your phone in the same way. But if you get to a system that has 170 hard drives, it's stored in different ways by different manufacturers. Across all those different devices.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: So when we have to rebuild data, we have to start layer by layer at the physical layer and rebuild to the point where you can actually see all the parts of the file that may have been across a bunch of different drives.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And that's just kind of what I think is the magical part of what we do is rebuild that file from data that was stored all over, whether stored physically on one hard drive or virtually. In other parts of those hard drives in that system and put it all back together again. We use the term Humpty Dumpty all the time around here, which is strange, but it's very analogous to our work.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah, I was thinking it's like a folder in a filing cabinet and all the paper is in one little folder. You take it out and throw the paper on the ground. Well, that's a lot of what a RAID is. The computer will keep track of what page is what and what goes to that folder so it knows what it is.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And then to extend that just one step further, in a ransomware attack, when files are encrypted, and this is just, again, trying to help explain it for the layman, imagine that folder, which had... You know, a hundred pages of paper in there.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Imagine that those hundred pieces of paper were, you know, thrown on the ground, but then the threat actor decided to pick up randomly 10 pages out of that hundred, and then they shredded them or they burned them.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And then we have to take 90 of the hundred pages, somehow put them all back together again, and then rebuild the data for those 10 pages that are missing. So that's what we do. But it's a great analogy and it helps explain it for the layman. Like, okay, what do you mean the data is encrypted or it's deleted?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Can I do one more layer though? No. Because this is what's exciting, how we're successful with ransomware.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: In the case of a threat actor that has now deleted the backup or the backup has also been encrypted, those are the same, they're copies of the same data. So those 10 pages that were shredded might be different 10 pages on the backup. So we now will take and look for the 10 pages that were shredded and put it back to the 90 that we found.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Now we can complement the recoveries and actually make a good file, a good set of files from scratch where we did not decrypt. We found all the pages, put them together. And sometimes some users have three or four backup systems that were functional, but the threat actors did X, Y, Z to those.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: We're able to take all of those and piece them together to make complete sets. We had a customer that they paid over seven figures. They got the decryption key. So they were like, we had to pay them. We had to do that. They run the key and it didn't work. We get this all the time. It didn't work. Now they had to use our services. Within days, we got all the data back.

DANO WEIR: That's amazing.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah.

DANO WEIR: So as I mentioned at the start of the show, we're a financial advisor. So in the financial space. So if you think about value, if you think about money, right? We were in a physical world for a long time and then here comes the promise of the digital world, right? So now you don't even have to, there's no threat of being, having, you know, your pocket picked. We're going to put it all on digital. It's going to be digital cash.

DANO WEIR: That digital cash has now become physical cash again. We're sort of back to the physical space.

DANO WEIR: How have you, Mike or Andy, the crypto world, how has that intersected with what you do here?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah, I was going to say, so...

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Well, other than paying ransom demands in Bitcoin, which is the common practice, and there are very specific rules around, you know, that have to be followed if there is a payment facilitation that's made through a crypto broker. Like there are certain cyber criminals that the federal government, the U. S. Federal government has prohibited any interaction with.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: So engaging with a firm that specializes in that kind of work, if a ransom demand is made. It's very important to find the right company and then to follow those laws so that you're very careful. But that's the only way that ransom demands are ever paid is through a crypto broker.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: So anyway. Yeah, but it's the same thing. But when you do that, many times businesses, they don't have crypto. They don't have a wallet to pull from. They don't have the money in the wallet to do. So there's such a learning curve, you know, just for the paying the ransom. The other thing is that if they did invest in crypto, well, are they on an exchange?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Is it something that's accessible only by the CEO? Do they have a ledger, a physical device that they're going to use, they're going to hold? Well, what if that device fails, which it does? What if they forget the actual, you know, pin code to that? They do.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: What if they forget the seed phrase that's supposed to be able to figure out your private keys and all this? Well, You forget those. You have the seed phrase in the wrong order. And so there's so many different reasons that you're going to unfortunately lose access to your crypto. Or you have it on a hard drive. And the hard drive goes click, click, click, click.

DANO WEIR: And have you? Have you recovered?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah, absolutely. Have we recovered? It's, yeah, since crypto came out.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: It has, if it has a zero and a one and it's needed by somebody, we've seen it.

DANO WEIR: I mentioned your Hall Of Fame at the start of the episode, and we have to get to that because this was one thing that just blew my mind. Your website's drivesaversdatarecovery.com. You can see it on there. There's photos around the office here. Your office is amazing, by the way. All kinds of great memorabilia.

DANO WEIR: You have to tell me some of these stories. I love movies and music. Do you know any of them off the top of your head?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: What's a good one? Well, I mean, for me, it's going to be the... The Simpsons, you know, where Bill Oakley, he's one of the producers. Back in the day, he had a SyQuest cartridge. So this was a 44-megabyte SyQuest cartridge. And he never had— SyQuest cartridge. It's a car—you said zip, 100-megabyte zip cartridge. Yeah. And this was before that.

DANO WEIR: So— Like a big floppy.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: It's like a big floppy. Five or quarter inch.

DANO WEIR: But not the actual floppy.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: No, no. It's actually a hard drive platter inside of this case. And so he would put the... Put his scripts on the Syquist cartridges and take it with him. He didn't want to leave it at the office. He didn't want to leave it on a hard drive. So he was.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: He was doing the right thing by having it on a backup device. It's just he didn't have a backup of it. So the Who Shot Mr. Burns episode was coming out. And what script was on there? The Who Shot Mr. Burns script was not complete. It was on that cartridge.

DANO WEIR: And it failed and you saved the episode?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: It failed and we saved the episode. It was so cool. And we actually have a little picture of that where he signed it. And it was exciting. It's like, you know, because The Simpsons has been around for a long time, but this is when it was first coming out. Yeah. So super fun. So that was exciting.

DANO WEIR: Any others off the top of your head you remember? Famous ones?

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, Gene Roddenberry is a fantastic one for the estate. It wasn't Gene Roddenberry himself. He had passed, but it's for the estate. And they had.

DANO WEIR: He's the creator of Star Trek, if you don't know. Oh, yeah.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Sorry, sorry, sorry.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: So he had.

DANO WEIR: For our Trekkers out there. Exactly.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, the estate had a couple hundred floppy disks, and they didn't know what were on it, and they were five and a quarter inch. I keep saying that. It was about that big. So they didn't have a modern computer that could read it. They had the old computer, the original computer they had, but it just wasn't functional.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: And so we were able to recover all of the data that was on those floppies, and it was really cool to meet those from the estate. They drove it up to us. A few floppies at a time. They didn't want to have all the floppies in one place at one time.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: So we do a few recoveries and then do some more. And a lot of times we do that when it's that sensitive, when it's something where it's a whole collection of something, we will send it in segments in case there is something that happens along the way. But that was super cool.

DANO WEIR: That's amazing.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: To be able to do that, to help out the estate and see some things.

DANO WEIR: Nine inch nails, the grateful dead's Bob. We're no relation, which there was.

DANO WEIR: Bruce Willis for Die Hard 4.

DANO WEIR: Is it fair to say that you're kind of Hollywood's go-to?

DANO WEIR: Oh, crap.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, Skywalker Ranch is just down the street. I've heard that. I have heard that. I have heard that. You see we have a few Skywalker Ranch.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And as a California company, yes, we've been very fortunate to serve Hollywood for a long time.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Yeah, and I'm a Star Wars and a Star Trek fan, so I kind of like them both. That's why that was exciting.

DANO WEIR: It doesn't need to be a war.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: No.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Right.

DANO WEIR: It's okay. There's no competition.

DANO WEIR: And yet not only just Hollywood, because you told me prior to the episode, you are Apple's go-to when it comes to data recovery. So talk about that relationship.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah. So that's been fostered over many, many years. But more than 20, we have worked with Apple as a preferred data recovery partner. So if you walk into an Apple store anywhere in the world and you're...

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Icloud backup was not working and something happens to your phone, for example, you dropped it in a lake. We talked about that a little bit earlier. Some kind of water damage like that. And you realize all your pictures are not available and they're your wedding photos or whatever.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Apple stores will, the Genius Bar, we've been working with them for so long, they will refer. Their customers to us because that's not a service that the Genius Bar offers. So, so we've been, and it's not just iPhones, but it's iPads and iMacs and MacBooks and on, but it requires certain certifications in order for us to be able to open up the device without voiding the warranty is the word I was looking for.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Yeah. So we, and, and there are one example, we've worked with Dell for over 20 years. We've worked with Western digital and other, you know, manufacturers, technology manufacturers for a very, very long time.

DANO WEIR: Mike, you told me you actually don't want people to come to you.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Well, I mean, if they have a failure, yes, absolutely come here. But when I was first hired in 1994, one of the owners, he's passed since, but he interviewed me and he said, you know, we're going to have a great time for probably till the year 2000 or so, you know, bubble memory is going to be coming up.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: Bubble memory. Look it up.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: It's a way to store data. I guess that didn't hit. Didn't hit.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: But the whole idea was that everything's going to be on more of a stable platform. Spinning hard drives won't exist anymore. Flash will come up, and then even that would be replaced. And the reality is we have grown and grown and grown because there's so much data in everybody's lives. Back in 1994, or A lot of the families had a computer, but nobody had a phone on them.

MIKE COBB, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING: And then by the year 2000, everybody had a laptop. And then in 2007, the iPhone came out, and then the IPad. I mean, it's everywhere. Data is absolutely throughout, even in our cars. We've done recoveries for crash, you know, when there's a crash, and you need to have the footage from that crash to prove you did or did not do something, like run a red light. Then that is, you know, something we need to recover.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: But we do, we do. We try to do a good job from a thought leadership perspective in promoting better backup practices and helping clients. We don't do consulting services. We talked briefly about this, but in our social media posts and thought leadership pieces that we put out, we try to do as much as we can around promoting the idea of multiple backups. And I think that is the answer why we...

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: We are the ambulance that shows up after an accident, unfortunately, human accident, you know, intentionally by a threat actor or accidentally because humans make errors or natural disasters. But, you know, backup, backup, backup and have one copy in your hands, have another copy off site, have another copy in the cloud. You know, three backups is the is the general rule.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: And we hope that people don't lose data, but we have to be here when they do.

DANO WEIR: It's such an incredible story that I stumbled upon because I had a card fail. And I kept coming back to Drive Savers, Drive Savers, Drive Savers, World Renown, World Renown. It's right down the street in Nevada. I went, I got to talk to these guys.

DANO WEIR: Ask yourself. The point of today's episode is to ask yourself, what is the value of your digital stuff?

DANO WEIR: Your books, your family photos, that project you've been working on forever. Have you ever put a dollar value on it? Have you ever even thought of it?

DANO WEIR: And that's really all I was hoping for today. I want you to consider it because unfortunately it can happen and it can happen in multiple ways, whether it's an accident or whether it's intentional from someone else.

DANO WEIR: So you can learn more about DriveSavers at drivesaversdatarecovery.com. My name is Dan O'Weir. I'm with Sonoma Wealth Advisors. We're a fiduciary financial advisor in Sonoma. You can learn more about us at SonomaWealth. Com. Take our free wealth analysis. Wherever you found this show, thank you so much for watching.

DANO WEIR: We really appreciate you making it all the way to the end. If you liked it, if you enjoyed the episode, we do appreciate likes and subscribes and any other interactivity that you want to throw our way. And we will see you next episode. Andy and Mike, thank you so much, guys. Thank you, Dan.

ANDY MAUS, HEAD OF CYBER RECOVERY: Thank you.

DANO WEIR: Thanks for watching and listening to It's All Money. We hope today's episode shared information to increase your financial confidence. Now is the time in the show for the voiceover with a bunch of words at the end. Listen close, though. You might find out something you didn't know.

DANO WEIR: It's All Money is powered by Sonoma Wealth Advisors. Sonoma Wealth Advisors helps individuals and families in Northern California and across the country with building, managing, and sustaining wealth.

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DANO WEIR: It's All Money features human hosts, musicians, editors, video crew, and voiceover talent. Video production by Forz Media in Roanoke Park, California. Online at forzmedia.com. Music by Neon Beach, Sparkle Rising on Soundstripe. Voice over by me, Dano.

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