IPod Take a Swim? All May Not Be Lost
By Jim Stingl, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Aug. 29–The average computer will go haywire if you even look at it wrong, yet it’s capable of coughing up its precious contents after taking a swim in the floodwaters we’ve seen in Wisconsin.
A data recovery company from suburban Minneapolis is offering free evaluations for anyone sending in soggy computer hard drives, and it has capped the price to retrieve the files, photographs and such at $850.
I don’t know enough about data recovery to say if that’s a great deal, but Kroll Ontrack Inc. is pledging to give 10% of the money to the Red Cross.
“People have lost memories, and they’ve lost critical information for their business,” said the firm’s vice president of operations, Todd Johnson. (Their number is (800) 872-2599.)
You’ve seen the TV images of people wading through their basements and living rooms and piling ruined furniture on the curb. In this age of electronics, you can assume the flotsam of the flood also includes water-averse gadgets such as computers, phones, digital cameras, iPods and video games.
Don’t assume the stuff you keep on your computer is lost forever, even if it’s floating, Johnson said. And don’t make matters worse by shaking or disassembling the hard drive, or trying to dry it yourself with a hair dryer or, worse yet, an oven.
It’s better to send it in wet and let a pro take a whack at it. Time is the enemy of drenched data.
So far, Rich Huhn hasn’t had anyone bring a flood-damaged computer to his store, Orion Computer Services of Prairie du Chien, in the hard-hit western part of the state.
“In general, electronics don’t like water. Sometimes you can dry them out and get them to work, and sometimes not,” he said.
Hard drives and the spinning platters they contain are remarkably forgiving and will survive floods, hurricanes and other disasters without losing their data.
They tell me the same is true of the memory cards that store photos inside a digital camera. You may indeed have to buy a new camera if yours spends much time under water, but your snapshots just might survive unless you’ve fumbled the camera off the side of a moving cruise ship.
My neighbor was telling me that she baptized her Canon in a Wisconsin lake when her canoe capsized recently. She air-dried it and prayed over it, and after about a week it seemed as good as new, with photos and videos intact.
Dean Hettinga, manager of Ritz Camera downtown, said he had photos stored on CDs, which wound up on the wet floor during a house fire with firefighters walking on them. The photos were fine.
Apple didn’t call me back, but I learned from ipodwizard.net that an iPod left out in the rain often comes back to life, but the prognosis goes downhill if it does some hot-tubbing or goes through the wash. Don’t turn it on until it’s completely dry, the site says, and a good way to do that is leaving it face-down on the dashboard of a car in direct sun.
The short answer to how much water cell phones like is “none,” said Shad Darvi from Cellular Phone Repair Services Inc. in Los Angeles. Saltwater and soda are even deadlier. Take the battery out and let the phone dry.
If enough of you write to me with your own horror stories involving electronics that took on water or other elements, I’ll string them together in a future column.
One last word of advice: Singing in the shower, good. Accompanying yourself with Guitar Hero, bad.
Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or e-mail at jstingl@journalsentinel.com.
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