Investigative firm, Kroll's data recovery unit, Kroll Ontrack is helping businesses crawl out form under the muck...one hard drive at a time.

Via the Minnesota Star Tribune:

Rescuing the data from the morass

H.J. Cummins
Star Tribune
Published September 11, 2005

There's still mud as thick as gumbo roux in and around much of New Orleans. But as people begin thinking beyond survival to recovery, some are wading into their businesses to salvage the records they will need to start over. Don't think muddy file cabinets. They're as outdated as the rotary phone. Think computers -- specifically, the hard drives inside them whose spinning disks are now the repository of everything from employee pay scales to customer addresses to the secret formula to the company's success.

Last week, the first of the drives pulled from the bayou muck started arriving at Kroll Ontrack, a data-recovery company based in Eden Prairie. Kroll Ontrack is a unit of Kroll Inc., which is part of risk consultant Marsh & McLennan Co., both based in New York. A crescendo of phone calls started up, too, mostly from people asking, if they get their hard drives up to Kroll Ontrack, is there any hope of retrieving anything on them?

At least one business had the bad luck of Hurricane Katrina hitting both its headquarters and its backup storage site, said Jim Reinert, senior director of software and services at Kroll Ontrack. "It was just such a huge storm," Reinert said. When those calls come in, he is in fact very encouraging. "Every case is different, but in general we expect those drives to be highly recoverable," he said. "Even if they're buried in nasty water, they are mostly recoverable."

The first thing Kroll Ontrack does is advise customers how to handle the drives: Don't try to turn on the computer. Package them like they were fine china. And don't let them dry out -- a sealed plastic bag usually does the trick. At the Eden Prairie laboratories, the drives go through diagnostics to find out how many files have survived. Much of the cleaning needs to be done in a special "clean room," where air quality, temperature and humidity are hyper-controlled. A speck of dust can disable the disks.

The company manages to retrieve part or all of almost 90 percent of the drives that come through, said Jeff Pederson, manager of data recovery operations. Floods and fires often do less damage than internal problems, such as another part of the hard drive hitting the disks, Pederson said. The files under any scrape are gone, he said. Kroll Ontrack retrieved 99 percent of the contents of two laptop drives from the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart in its return to Earth in February 2003. The drives were found at the bottom of a lake, Reinert said. Some of the other requests coming from the Gulf region involve recorded tapes, still the most common form of backup, Pederson said.

One credit union got its tapes safely out of New Orleans, he said, but then had to bring them to Kroll because it didn't have the equipment to run them. Kroll Ontrack transfers the recovered files to CDs, DVDs or external hard drives. For some idea of the volume of information involved, the company explained: The typical drive comes in with about 20 gigabytes of data. It would take more than 4 million sheets of paper to cover that much material. Those sheets, in a stack, would be taller than the Empire State Building.

For a standard PC or laptop, the company charges about $100 for the diagnosis and $1,000 to recover files, Reinert said. Prices vary for more complicated drives and for batches of 20, 50 or more drives from a client company. The diagnosis usually takes a day or two. The whole process, start to finish, usually takes two to five days. Kroll Ontrack is gearing up for a jump in business because of the hurricane, though Reinert said they really don't know yet what to expect. "It could be hundreds of jobs, or thousands; it's too soon to know," he said. "But our business usually tracks with the recovery in cases like this, so we're looking at months, for sure."

The original article appears here.

-- MDT

Labels: Bayou Group, China, Kroll