Gillware Inc.

Every month Gillware gives away a small prize to the best customer-submitted recovered photo with description. This is our way of showing how much we value and enjoy helping our customers retrieve their precious data. We know that each and every crashed drive is a disaster and we take personal pride in helping you get it back.

Each month we pick a winner and give away a $25 gift certificate to an internet retailer.

If Gillware has recovered any photos that are particularly meaningful to you, send us an email with a one-paragraph explanation as to why the photo is important to you and attach the photo. Just send the email to with the subject "Photo Contest" if you'd like to enter! So get that favorite baby picture, pet picture, wedding photo out, it could be worth $25!

Around Thanksgiving, my laptop hard drive crashed - I'd blame Dell, but the truth is, we dropped it a few too many times. Being the technical geek that I am, I recognized that it was failing and frantically copied my work off to my other computer. I successfully was able to save my e-mail, favorites, documents and all of my freelance work. Unfortunately, time ran out before I was able to save my pictures. These weren't any pictures - these were all of the pictures from this past year. You know - Paige before diagnosis, home from the hospital, last day of radiation, the Race for Hope, the beach retreat through Believe in Tomorrow and the Ride for Kids. All of it. Gone.

While at CompUSA (frantically buying a geeked-out adapter), I saw a brochure for a company that restores data from failed drives. I asked the kid at the counter (as I was paying for my eight-dollar ($8) item) what he thought about using them. His take was that their prices started around a thousand dollars ($1,000) and wasn't worth it for some pictures.

At home, after I realized that I had failed at getting my pictures back, I tearily eyed realized that those pictures were WORTH a $1,000 - if not more. How could I lose those pictures? I couldn't and I wouldn't.

I started searching the Internet and found a handful of places that do hard drive restoration. In that search, I came across Gillware and found that their price (for my particular machine type) was $379 w/ the possibility of an additional $300. I sent them an e-mail, pleading my story and found a warm and wonderful person on the other end. Early the next morning, I got the reply that they would try to do the drive, thought Paige was beatiful and that they wished my family the best.

I shipped the drive from the FedEx story on Black Friday. It got to them the following Thursday and the next day, Brian called to tell me that they had success. I called back on Monday to find that they restored approximately 4,700 photos (2.3 gigabytes in geek terms). If I had been there, I would have probably hugged and kissed Brian - this was the sweetest news that I could hear. In 3 days, I had my drive back and a DVD of pictures in my hands.

Douglas Setzer
http://www.paigeforhope.com

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