PRESS RELEASE
Feb 00 95
Norwegian ‘data-rescue' ready to help flood victims

A Norwegian team of ‘data rescuers' is ready to help recover data worth many hundreds of millions of dollars after the disastrous flooding in Holland, Germany, Belgium and France. Insurance companies estimate that the cost to a single PC user of re-keying lost data can be as high as USD 200,000.
According to the Norwegian company IBAS, which specialises in data rescue, most losses occur when PC owners themselves try to retrieve data. The company was able to recover almost all the data it was commissioned to rescue after the floods in Italy last autumn. One notable achievement was that production in firms with thousands of employees was saved after ‘drowned' data was resuscitated by IBAS.

Corrosion

‘Some foreign insurance companies estimate that each megabyte of lost data costs over 2,000 dollars to re-key', notes IBAS Export Manager Torstein Engen. ‘Nowadays, many companies have hard disks of 500 megabytes or more, so they could be looking at over a million dollars for each hard disk they lose'.
Water damage can mean even bigger problems for data storage equipment. Water and mud can penetrate the hard disk itself, through the air filter, for example, and moisture can cause corrosion of all metallic components'.

Full crash

Engen also points out that the big problems arise when owners try to rescue the content of hard disks themselves. When the machine is switched on, there can be a total crash of both read and write heads, so that the user has no possibility of making contact with the data.
‘A user should under no circumstances try to read or copy data from a water-damaged computer. The hard disk should be carefully removed and placed in a waterproof plastic bag to retain moisture. If the contents are worth more than 1,800 kroner, the hard disk can be forwarded to be diagnosed by experts, and we can tell a client how much data can be saved within a maximum of 48 hours', said Engen.
IBAS has agents in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Italy, and operates throughout Europe, in all industries where data is used.



For further information, please contact
IBAS
Torstein Engen, Export Manager, or
Olav Nysæter, Technical Manager
Norway
Tel: +47 62 81 01 00



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