It was one of the worst days in my life. I turned on my computer and nothing happened. After the initial panic I calmed down and assured myself that it was some minor problem, easily fixed by one of the local computer repair centers.

I brought my computer in and an hour later received their expected call which I thought would assure me, as it had in the past, that they’ve already fixed the computer and it was ready to be picked up.

Instead, they told me that it was all gone. Thirty years of work destroyed. All my stories and photos, all my accounts, and all my contact names and numbers were lost forever. I was finished, and I was not alone.

Every year and in every country hundreds of thousands share my fate. Companies go out of business, thousands of employees are fired, millions of dollars in business are lost, and there are even suicides—all because they, like over eighty percent of computer users, didn’t back up their data and it was lost.

In my case it was a malicious computer virus created by some vindictive programmer and attached to a file I downloaded from the Internet. For others it might be mechanical failure where one of the delicate components of your hard drive, the part of the computer that stores your information, broke and stopped working. Or it might be an electrical problem like what happens when your office or home is hit by lightening—this can short out the electrical components of the hard drive the same way a phone stops working when it is dropped into a bath-tub full of water.

No matter what the reason, the outcome is the same. For all intents and purposes your computer is gone; it won’t run and if it does none of the work or information you stored on it is accessible. It is the technological equivalent of your house burning down; Even if it is still physically there, everything that made it yours is gone forever.

I let the phone fall, shocked. I felt as if I had been robbed and beaten. But I couldn’t call the police. The Fire Department couldn’t help. What was I to do? Who could I call?

The answer was one of the best kept secrets of the world’s governments and billion dollar Fortune 100 companies. The answer was Ontrack Data International.

I gave them a call and in less than thirty minutes they had restored all my lost information to me and made my computer work again, and they did it all over the phone.

How could they do this? They could do it because they are a data recovery company and for the past fifteen years they have developed ways to bring computers back from the dead.

But Ontrack is not just a data recovery company, they are The data recovery company. They invented data recovery in the first place and since
the early 80’s they’ve brought back thousands of businesses, even world governments, back from the brink of disaster by restoring to them their lost information.

Ontrack’s story begins in the early days of personal computers. Around 1982 a major advance in computers was developed—hard drives that could hold up to one-hundred megabytes of data. But there was a problem. DOS, which operated the computer then the way windows does now, couldn’t handle a hard drive that was bigger than thirty-two megabytes.

Two programmers, John Pence and Gary Stevens, created a program called Disk Manager which allowed DOS to use bigger hard drives, solving the problem and making their careers. They then formed Ontrack Data International and are still its President and Vice-president today.

Twenty-six million copies of Disk Manager have been sold making it one of the best selling programs of all time and it is still packaged with most hard drives.

Because most hard drives started to come with Disk Manager in the early 80’s, Ontrack began to be the people called if something went wrong with a hard drive.

“We had a lot of customers calling in with data loss situations and we realized that we were in a unique position to help them. We understood exactly how a hard drive worked and if anyone could find a way to fix it, we could,” says Mike Burmeister, Director of Data Recovery at Ontrack.

Ontrack had their teams of engineers and computer programmers develop technology to get back the information on damaged hard drives, and so the data recovery industry was born.

Now there are hosts of data recovery companies advertising on the Internet and in computer magazines. But Ontrack is still unique.

Most other data recovery companies just run software programs that you or I could buy at any computer store ourselves, but Ontrack actually has teams engineers and computer programmers wearing white lab coats who physically work on the hard drives in special anti-static ‘clean rooms’.

These technicians use closely guarded software programs and special tools developed for over a decade by Ontrack which allow them to do things that other data recovery companies can only dream of.

If the information on your computer is corrupted by a virus, they can fix it by using special virus removal software or actually going through every program by hand and removing the damaging virus. If there is a mechanical problem they will replace the damaged parts or rebuild the hard drive from scratch. And if it is an electrical failure they use high powered microscopes to replace the tiny wires and conductors that feed power to your machine.

Another major advantage that Ontrack has over its competition is that the money the company made from its Disk Manager software allowed them to purchase a huge inventory of spare parts and equipment.
“Over the years all the technology changes quickly, and if you’re going to recover information from a hard drive that’s five years old you can’t just go out and buy the right parts if you need to replace them. You must have them in stock and that is what often times allows us to recover data that another company couldn’t possibly,” says Burmeister.

With 36 million dollars a year in business, Ontrack is the undisputed leader of the data recovery industry.

With their world headquarters in Minneapolis and branch offices in L.A., Washington D.C., San Jose, New York, London, Tokyo, Stuttgart, and Paris they are a truly international company and no matter where you are in the world, Ontrack can help.

But perhaps the biggest appeal of Ontrack, is the technology they invented and used to fix my computer over the phone line. They call it Remote Data Recovery and it is revolutionizing the entire data recovery industry.

Always in the past you had to take out your hard drive and send it to a data recovery company if you wanted the information restored. This cost time and money and when millions of dollars depend on meeting a business deadline, the time it takes to ship a hard drive back and forth may be disastrous.

As a solution to this problem, Ontrack developed the Data Advisor. With this program they can fix your computer by modem over the phone line in under an hour, saving shipping expenses as well as time.

The first step is to either download the Data Advisor program from Ontrack’s Internet site or too call Ontrack and have them mail it to you. Once you have the program it will create for you a Data Advisor program disk on one of your blank diskettes. You then take the Data Advisor disk and put it into your damaged computer and turn the it on.

The Data Advisor program disk will allow the computer to turn on without a hard drive. It will then detect your modem and call into Ontrack.

There, engineers hundreds of miles away are able to look at your hard drive and figure out what is wrong. Once they’ve diagnosed the problem, the Ontrack engineering team will proceed to fix your computer while you wait in the comfort of your own home.

They fixed my computer in twenty minutes and most of their Remote Data Recovery cases take less than an hour.

But, though it was destructive, my problem was just a simple computer virus. What about really tough problems?

“We have a lot of fun stories,” laughs Burmeister, “and if it is at all possible to recover the data, we will.” Burmeister’s fun stories include a computer that was in a burning building for most of a night and whose case had completely melted, several laptop computers that were run over by a car, a computer thrown into a hot-tub by an angry teenage son, and even several stolen computers that were found by a fisherman after lying on the bottom of Lake Michigan for several months. Ontrack was able to recover the information off all of these machines.

Ontrack became so respected as miracle workers that they began to be approached even by government Intelligence agencies and the military. This posed a major problem, however, because the information they were being asked to retrieve was so secret that only high ranking government officials with top security clearance could look at it.

The need was so great that the US government coordinated with Ontrack’s security department and helped them to meet the rigorous qualifications for top-secret security clearance. “The main reason we opened our Washinton D.C. office was to work more closely with the US government,” says Burmeister.

Ontrack then created its Computer Evidence Services department specifically designed to deal with this kind of sensitive material. “We have a large area that only our employees with top security clearance can go into, really only the engineers that do the work itself. It is a clean room that is static free so there is no damage to the electrical components of open hard drives. It is secure by military and Intelligence standards and we have top security clearance with several governments around the world.”

The Computer Evidence Services at Ontrack works closely with the FBI, CIA, State Department, Department of Defense, NASA and the US military, as well as local law enforcement agencies and law firms.

“Many of our cases consist of somebody being investigated by the police or the government and intentionally deleting damning evidence to cover their tracks.” says Burmeister, “When you delete a file it doesn’t actually dissappear. All that happens is that the links that allow you to retrieve that information are destroyed; We know how to re-establish those links and can get the deleted evidence back for the authorities.”

Ontrack also has a very close relationship with the governments of the countries in which they have branch offices and our often called in to recover lost information off computers for governments outside of the US. “We even had a hand in helping Kuwait to recover after Saddam Hussein’s invasion,” boasts Burmeister.

In fact, Ontrack has been so integral to helping the governments of the world, that the US Department of Defense awarded them with the prestigious James S. Cogwell Award for industrial security for the second time this year. Only a handful of businesses qualify for this award each year and of those less than 1% actually receive it. That Ontrack has received the award twice is testament to the quality of work they produce.

But, like all things of quality, Ontrack’s services come with a price. For the kind of job that a single individual or small business might need done prices range from four-hundred dollars to twelve-hundred dollars depending on the difficulty of the task and the time involved. For the kind of large networks that massive corporations use and require hundreds of hours of work and teams of engineers to fix, costs range as high as ten-thousand dollars.

But with the alternative being the end of your business or job, Ontrack is worth every penny.

Even with the knowledge that Ontrack can solve most of your data loss problems, it is still better to have a working back-up of your data, however.

There are some situations that even Ontrack can’t help you with. The most common of these is when something goes wrong mechanically in the hard drive and it rips up the material the data is stored on. “If you hear strange sounds coming from your computer, for God’s sake, turn it off,” warns Burmeister. “The more you use the hard drive in that condition, the more damage is done and you can get to a point where there is nothing left.”

But if paranoid Intelligence agencies and the military trust Ontrack with their secrets and to fix there problems, you can too. Assures Burmeister, “If it is humanly possible to fix your machine, and it almost always is, we will.”

– The End –
By Lance Laytner
Copyright 2008
Meritum Media