THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 16, 1997 TAG: 9701160297
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: 72 lines
New jobs come to Gary S. Anderson for many different reasons: natural disasters such as lightning strikes and hurricanes; people forgetting to back up their computer files, then accidentally deleting them; or workers taking out their frustrations on their computers.
So much business has come Anderson's way in the past 2 1/2 years that he has begun selling franchises throughout the country.
Anderson, 50, just established AEI-Computer Data Recovery and licensed its first franchise in Sacramento, Calif. Franchises are set to open soon in Richmond and Raleigh, and AEI will hatch five more this year.
The Sacramento franchisee began just in time to rake in business salvaging computers that were damaged in the recent West Coast flooding.
Anderson's Chesapeake office did some similar work in September after Hurricane Fran flooded offices in North Carolina.
In the recent past, Anderson also bailed out a researcher at a Hampton Roads hospital who did not back up his hard drive when doing research under a government grant. The hard drive crashed, and AEI restored the files.
He's also salvaged the files of a local businessman whose frustration with technology sent him to AEI: ``The computer wasn't working fast enough and he needed something,'' Anderson said, ``so he picked it up and threw it across the room.''
For all these reasons, business is booming for AEI. The Chesapeake company will do about $450,000 worth of work this year.
Data recovery, though, is not the business Anderson wanted to start when he retired from the Navy 2 1/2 years ago. Anderson had noticed during his work overseeing Navy computer systems that computer files rarely were backed up or protected.
He thought he could work as a business consultant teaching companies how to minimize their risk of losing computer data.
``They didn't want to listen,'' Anderson said. ``Then when they lose files, it's like I'm E.F. Hutton - they listen to every word you say.''
Basically, an information-storing part of a computer's hard drive is tougher than most people think, Anderson says. AEI has been able to recover the data stored on 95 of 100 hard drives businesses or people have wrecked.
Even in the case of water damage, AEI can retrieve data from the hard drive's platten, the part of the drive where information is imprinted and stored. AEI removes the information from the drive and puts it onto a CD-ROM to send back to the customer.
AEI in Chesapeake consists of just Anderson and two engineers who work for him. They can do the work about 60 percent of the time. On cases when the actual hard drive has to be taken apart, it has to be done in a ``clean room.'' It costs $500,000 to build one of those dust-free rooms, so AEI sends those cases to Ontrack Data International in Minnesota.
Anderson has formed a partnership with Ontrack in which he gets a preferred rate for any business AEI sends its way.
Generally, the less-complex jobs cost $500-$600 to recover files from a smaller hard drive, say a 200 megabyte model. It costs $1,000 or more to recover data from larger hard drives, Anderson says.
In just a couple of years of business, Anderson has recovered data from many different sizes of hard drives - for many different reasons. Sitting in his home/office right now is a laptop computer that looks like it was dropped from an airplane.
``Somebody came into a business and obviously didn't like the person and took a hammer to this notebook computer,'' Anderson explains. ILLUSTRATION: AFTER THE FLOOD
[Color Photos]
Associated Press File Photo
MORT FRYMAN
The Virginian-Pilot
Gary Anderson's AEI-Computer Data Recovery has licensed its first
franchise in California.