I'm such a pessimist that I get paranoid that people avoid me since I always seem to be running about waving my hands saying "your hard drive is going to crash" and  "backup, backup, backup" makes me less than fun to be around.

But it's true, with all that spinning around most likely your first serious computer failure is going to be a hard drive failure. Problem is that no matter how good you are at taking backups you're going to lose some data.

When that happens my aforementioned Chicken Little routine sets off a reminder in the victim's mind and they end up calling me. And yes, I do try and refrain from asking them where their backup is.

In the past there wasn't much I could do. Perhaps boot off an alternative drive and see what I could see on the damaged drive with a sector viewer and various other "bare metal" utilities and try and recover a file sector by sector but often the choice was simply 1) forget it or 2) send the drive off to an expensive data recovery service. With the latter results were iffy, sometimes it worked well, other times not so well but one thing was for sure; it was going to hurt (financially) almost as much as losing a project or pictures of the kids.

I've now found a life raft or more to the point a life boat in the form of a data recovery program called Selkie Rescue from Tugboat Enterprises.

The concept is elegant and all you need is a Selkie Rescue boot CD (or floppy disk) and a 2nd computer. Both computers need to be network capable and you'll also need a network cable; either conventional cable if you already run a network or a straight through (also known as a "gaming" cable) if you don't.

Bring up the computer running from the Selkie Rescue boot disk and answer a few simple questions and run the "file browser" on the working computer and bang, the disabled computer is magically a file server you access from a working computer.

On the left you have the files on the crashed computer, in the middle you have folder contents and on the right you have a window of folders on the working computer. Select what you want off the crashed computer, select a destination on the working computer click the next button and it's copied from the crashed computer to the working computer. Alternatively you may use the native Windows networking structure if that's more to your taste.

I have no idea what kind of voodoo magic goes on behind the doors deep within Selkie Rescue that allows it to access and recover data from damaged hard drives but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I had a damaged hard drive that I had been meaning to try and recover for a couple of years and I hooked it up, got to it from another computer on the network and bang, everything that I wanted to grab from it was there. I was surprised that I didn't even have to load the special drivers for the RAID controller that I am required to use when I install Windows.

The crashed drive was formatted NTFS but I tried it on a non-damaged drive and Selkie Rescue work equally well on a FAT formatted drive.

Note that Selkie Rescue didn't actually repair the damaged drive, afterwards it was just as dead as it was before, but I could, and did, easily copy data from it via the network. Nor do I suspect that Selkie Rescue would recover data from a drive you'd taken a baseball bat to, it does need to be able to spin up, but it's going to work in the case of most hard drive failures.

Setting up a recovery network may sound intimidating but the Selkie Rescue will gently guide you through the process.

I keep thinking I've left something out but gosh, it's as simple as can be, the software does all the heavy lifting, you pretty much just click and go.

If you have any concerns about your data, even if you do backups, you'll want to check out Selkie Rescue. It's unique and by far the best alternative to recovering data from a damaged drive.

Selkie Rescue will set you back $100 (okay, $99.99) and you can download a demo (17Mb) that will limit recovery to the root directory. Give it a try, think you'll be amazed at how easy it is to set up and use.