Support for a Key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity.

Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee,

your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment,

no annual contracts, and no fees.

Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi.

Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities.

Xfinity, imagine that.

Restrictions apply, select plans only.

You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story, our questions, what really happened, what really

mattered, what happens next. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why.

From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Long ago, during my last summer of college, I wrote a novel, but my thesis advisor didn't like it, so I put it on a shelf, by which I mean I left it sitting in my computer. My senior year went on. I wrote a new thing. I did what most 22-year-olds do and moved on. And somewhere along the lines, I lost track of that computer, and with it, there went the book.

In my case, this digital loss is probably for the best, and I have only myself to blame, but that's not always the case.

Many are those whose devices have malfunctioned, hard drives failed, phones landed in the pond or whatever else,

and with that hardware went there financial records or baby photos, lost last voicemails from mom

and a host of other digital artifacts. In those cases, there are people you can call quite prominently

a company here in the Bay Area called Drive Savers, and New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas paid them a visit for his new story in the magazine Resurrection Hardware.

Welcome to Forum, Julian.

Thanks so much, Alexis.

So you took a deep dive into this kind of data recovery space. Had you lost something that made you want to look into the story? Yes, I had. In 2019, I reported on this reenactment of the largest slave rebellion in American history by this performance artist Dred Scott. And soon after that, I broke my

iPhone, which had all the recordings from this performance. In addition, my dad had passed away

not long before, and there were texts and voicemails from him. I was very sad to lose all of this.

I'm generally a pretty meticulous digital archivist.

...