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Jon Edwards often manages what appears impossible. He has recovered precious data from computers wrecked in floods and fires and dumped in lakes. Now Edwards may have set a new standard: He found information on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003. "When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn't even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted," said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack, outside Minneapolis. "It looked pretty bad at first glance, but we always give it a shot."

As our reliance on smartphones continues to grow, so does the fear of losing all the information they contain -- and for good reason. Fierce competition among handset manufacturers and carriers has resulted in a chaotic, seemingly impenetrable jungle of incompatible makes and models with backup and recovery functionality that often proves complicated to use. Though mobile device manufacturers typically build in data backup and restore applications into their wares, they are typically limited not just to the manufacturer or carrier but to a single model or even version of a single model.