Hungary firm offers to help recover data from hard drives in WTC rubble
A small Hungarian firm, one of only three worldwide able to recover damaged data from severely crashed computer hard drives, has offered to help salvage crucial data stored on mangled PCs in the destroyed World Trade Center in New York.
Kurt Computer Rt, owned by two brothers, was set up in 1989, fixing magnetic storage drives which were in short supply due to a ban the West then imposed on technology sales to the eastern bloc. ``If, according to my most pessimistic estimate, only five percent of damaged data storage units are in a suitable state for recovery, that's around 5,000 gigabytes of data,'' director Sandor Kurti told Reuters in an interview.
Hungary firm offers to save data from WTC rubble
Kurti assumes that around 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center, which was reduced to smouldering rubble by two suicide plane attacks last month. Each worker would have had a PC with at least two gigabytes of storage capacity.
Recovering a gigabyte of damaged data costs $1,000, he said, but added that his company would work for free if asked.
``There are situations when you feel this is the right thing to do and you don't measure it in money terms,'' Kurti said.
The work is fiddly and time-consuming. Kurti reckons his small team of 12 can recover 2.6 gigabytes of data per hour.
``It's like when you want to recover a piece of a puzzle, but for that the whole puzzle has to be restored,'' he said.
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