It's not often that the geeks get to help put a bad guy in the slammer but as eWeek reports, the geeks at Seagate Recovery Services managed to recover the video of a rapist's confession that was badly burned in the transfer from the original camcorder tape. The poor DA didn't have the original tape and couldn't read the CD. Defense council claims the DVD has exculpatory evidence so the DA has to produce it.

The story continues with Akbar and Jeff's Data Recovery Hut telling the DA the data can't be recovered and ends happily when the Seagate geeks fix the lead-in and lead-out so a standard DVD player can read it.

So the moral of the story is that there are good data recovery services and not-so-good ones. Since a not-so-good one takes a bad situation and makes it worse, go for the big boys right away. If you're desperate enough to resort to data recovery, don't try to do it on the cheap.