By DAVID BERTOLA
Business First

When BuffNET abruptly shut its doors in January, its Internet and e-mail customers weren't the only ones left out in the cold. Turns out much of the data used to create an estimated 300 Web sites may have been, too.

At the time, Shatter I.T. Global Services offered to have BuffNet Web sites and e-mails transferred to them at no charge. BuffNET co-founder Stephen Hovey declined that offer.

Instead, it appears the servers where many of the sites may have been housed were piled behind BuffNET's former West Seneca headquarters as garbage awaiting pickup.

Connie Stives of Computer S.O.S. Inc. hired BuffNET's last employee, Steve Prigg, following the shutdown. At Stives' urging, Prigg reached BuffNET co-founders regarding the status of the hardware and learned that it had been kicked to the curb.

Stives got permission from MacSolutions Plus Inc., a tenant at 10 Center Road that had been adjacent to BuffNET, to pick through the trash.

On Jan. 20, just 12 days after Hovey's e-mail to clients regarding the discontinuation of dialup and DSL services, Prigg and network specialist Mark Harris drove to BuffNET and returned with 17 hard drives and nine computers.

"We're not sure whether all the Web sites are on them, or what percentage we have," said Stives.

Only fragments of data have been recovered, but Stives remains hopeful.

Some of the files are old, from companies no longer in business. Portions of other sites, it appeared to Stives, had been deleted.

The recovery effort has been painstaking. Stives said trying to find specific files has taken up to 15 hours, squeezed among the company's other billable work. She also is wrestling with how to bill 15 hours for exploratory work when there's little to show for it.

Among BuffNET's former clients is David Broderdorf, president of Trinity Lutheran Church in West Seneca. An e-mail string forwarded to Business First included a Jan. 29 message from the church's Webmaster to Hovey, asking the whereabouts of the church's Web files. They included audio versions of sermons, meeting minutes and other data.

Hovey's response, also dated Jan. 29, read: "Thats (sic) stuff is all gone to the big recycler in the sky."

"I was devastated," said Broderdorf, who worked on the site for five years and paid Computer S.O.S. $500 to start piecing it back together.

Hovey could not be reached for this article. A call to BuffNET co-founder Gary Bacchetti's cell phone was not returned. Prigg, who started with Computer SOS on Jan. 12, no longer works there.