Data recovery firm rescues lost files when backup fails

LONGMONT — In January, members of the Longmont Area Economic Council felt the heat when a power surge in the building fried their computer networks’ central hard drive.

“It caused physical damage to the drive,´ said John Cody, president and chief executive of the LAEC, “and put recovering the data beyond my abilities.”

Because it was the central drive, Cody said it contained all of the council’s information plus it was central to the network and held information belonging to many people. Also, he said the backup system was not operating properly by not updating itself often enough.

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“To replace the lost data from scratch would cost thousands and an inestimable amount of time,” Cody said.

Then MJT Communications, located in Longmont and the host of LAEC’s Web site, referred Cody to Reynolds Data Recovery of Longmont.

“We’re a small computer service business, and we’ve been around for about 13 years,´ said Mike Lackovic, an engineer at Reynolds Data Recovery. “And it’s a fun business to be involved in.”

Lackovic said Reynolds does data recovery for disk failures that typically fall into one of two categories. Crashes are usually either a physical failure in the drive or a failure of the file structure.

If the failure is physical, he said, then engineers will replace the necessary parts of the drive to get it running again. If the crash is in the file structure, which may be the result of a virus or improperly reformatted drive, then often the file is not damaged, but instead the damage is in the way the drive accesses the file. Then the engineers go in and rebuild the access paths to get the drive running again.

“The LAEC was a pretty typical physical failure recovery job for us,” Lackovic said.

“It was a life-saving process,” Cody said.

“It’s not as expensive as many people think it is,” Lackovic said. “Also, it is definitely better than having an administrator spend a week sitting in front of a computer reentering the data by hand.”

Lackovic said Reynolds repairs for all types of computers and try to complete the repairs in less than 48 hours. Lackovic quoted prices for recovery between $300 and $800.

“For us, the price comes from the time and process involved in the recovery,” Lackovic explained. He said for many of its competitors the pricing also is influenced by the size of the drive.

“Why charge more for solving the same problem on a larger drive?´ said Lackovic. “That’s not very service oriented.”

“My impression is that they are competent and have good pricing,´ said Ivan Kaye, a member of the technical support staff located in Longmont for Maxtor Corp., a hard drive manufacturer.

He said he has no personal experience with Reynolds, but that Maxtor used to refer customers with data recovery needs to Reynolds, among a handful of other data recovery companies.

On Maxtor’s Web site today, the company only refers people to Internet search engines so they can find their own data recovery companies.

“This is a trend being seen all across the hard drive industry,” Lackovic said. “It’s probably a liability thing, but now customers can’t fully tell if they found a quality data recovery company or some guy working out of his garage.

“There are still big advantages to being located in Longmont,” Lackovic said. “The hardest part of our job is keeping up with the speed at which the technology is developing. To be in close proximity with large manufacturers gives us access to a lot of information and technology not easily available to other companies.”

He said one benefit is the Failure Analysis Groups hosted by Maxtor. At these meetings, he said Maxtor would team up with them to dissect a problem involving new technology that Reynolds’ engineers haven’t seen before.

“But still backing up your data is the best thing to do,” Lackovic noted. He said that three years ago Reynolds started to develop online data storage software on the Internet at onlinebackup.org. He said a person could store 400 megabytes of compressed data at an offsite data storage warehouse on the Internet for about $10 each month. Then the person can access this data from anywhere they can access the Internet.

He said Cody and LAEC gave up on their previous backup system and now use this online service through Reynolds.

“It’s kind of a synergistic approach,” Lackovic said. “If you don’t back up your data, then you just might find your drive in our labs.”