Two weeks ago, a hard drive used by the Harvard Computer Society (HCS) failed, forcing its members to spend $4,000 in club funds to retrieve lost data.

The hard drive contained accounts belonging to the organizations' members and stored their saved messages, papers and programs.

HCS officers spent $4,000 to hire Digital Equipment Data Recovery Services, a company that specializes in recovering lost data.

HCS President Carl J. Sjogreen '00 said the company managed to retrieve all of HCS's missing data through disk recovery.

Sjogreen had lost "all my saved messages for the last two years, [and] papers I had in process, but it's all back now," he said.

He said that HCS believed $4,000 was "a justified and necessary expense" because "a lot of important data was lost."

Four thousand dollars represents roughly one-third of the organization's annual budget.

HCS earns $5,000 to $10,000 for each "project" it accomplishes, Sjogreen said. HCS will earn $10,000 this year for maintaining the University's on-line calendar and another $1,000 from various student groups that want expanded accounts on the group's server.

According to the HCS web site, at http://www.hcs.harvard.edu, HCS holds the accounts of Society members and their guests as well as those of over 250 student groups.

Fortunately, no student organization data has ever been lost, and all of the members' lost data have been recovered.

Sjogreen said such hardware difficulties are unusual but not unprecedented. He said they occasionally occur due to the wear and tear of the hardware.