Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 24, 1993 TAG: 9305240122
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILL NASH POTOMAC NEWS
DATELINE: MANASSAS (AP) LENGTH: Medium
Bespectacled Mark J. Fischer looks like a typical computer whiz, but he's actually a regular Indiana Jones, seeking to uncover computer mysteries thought long lost.
Working with computer disks, tapes and hard drives that have been damaged in floods, fires and hurricanes, the 38-year-old Fischer retrieves priceless computer information that businesses and insurance companies once wrote off as a total loss.
Fischer's business, MJF Associates, started in 1973 in Loudoun County. He moved his company and family to Prince William County in 1978, but it was in 1976 that he had his first experience with disaster data recovery.
After installing a Hewlett Packard computer system for a tool manufacturer in Pennsylvania, Fischer was awakened by the phone one Sunday night to hear the owner of the company say his factory had just burned down along with its computer equipment and computerized records. While the company had kept backup computer disks in a fireproof safe, the fire was so hot the disks melted and bent. The factory owners wanted Fischer's help in accessing information from the damaged disks.
Fischer learned the next day that no one in the United States offered help recovering computer information from damaged disks. He knew he'd have to do it himself to save his client from financial ruin.
Forging new territory, Fischer and his staff gathered the disks, peeled them apart, stripped the melted protective cover off, carefully cleaned the emulsion area holding the information, and set up a special disk drive to read the disks.
Fischer recovered 99.9 percent of his client's information - saving the client thousands of dollars in lost time and write-offs on the lost records. And quite by accident, Fischer's career took a turn.
Seventeen years later, he is still one of a select few who can salvage burned, melted or flooded computer hardware and software - and now he's sought after by some of the biggest companies in the world. Disaster data recovery accounts for one-third of MJF's annual revenue, and it adds a little spice to an accounting program business. MJF has a track record of 98 percent data recovery, Fischer said.
"The thing that turns me on is not the money, but it's getting the information back," Fischer said.
Fischer's most challenging job to date was from a bank in Southern California. The bank had brought its backup tapes from its safe deposit box into the office to update with new backup information, a procedure the bank repeated once each week.
During the six-hour process when all the tapes were together, the bank caught fire and the tapes, containing hundreds of thousand of dollars of automatic teller transactions from one of its busiest weeks of the year, were badly damaged. Fischer and his crew were able to piece the tapes back together, lift the data and transfer it electronically to a new tape. In the end, MJF recovered 99 percent of the bank's lost information.
"Although a fire, or flood, is difficult to recover from any time, it can be fatal to a business that loses all its accounts receivable, accounts payable, personal and tax records in addition," Fischer said. "Always keep backups and keep them in a safe place."
And if a disaster destroys both the business and its off-site location MJF Associates wants businesses to know that it's here to help pick up the pieces and put them together again.
by CNB