Digital Journal — It wasn’t the December 31st of Y2K, but for one downtown Toronto hospital a few New Years ago, it must have seemed like it. As the clock inched closer to midnight, the hospital’s computers, one by one, blinked and then simply shut down.
The IT Department’s phones lit up immediately. From every floor, increasingly panicked calls jammed the lines: ER, the Burn Unit, Intensive Care, everyone. The hospital’s entire computing system had flat-lined. The implications for hundreds and hundreds were clear: How do you run a hospital when you can’t access the computers? Forget surgery. You can’t treat patients unless you know the medicine required or their dosages.
One of these calls reached the home of Bill Margeson, president and founder of CBL Tech Data Recovery in Markham, Ont. It might have been a hospital calling, but it was Margeson who was asking questions about vital signs. And the vitals were not good. Margeson gave his instructions, stabilizing the situation until he and his team could arrive on scene. This one was big, very big, and the clock was ticking. Lives hung in the balance and they knew it.
Margeson remembers the night well and speaks respectfully of the hospital’s IT guys as responding valiantly to a crisis far beyond their skills.
“They called in HP,” said Margeson, “as it was an HP system. But after 15 minutes, HP threw in the towel.
“They tried to rebuild the system but instead ended up activating a ‘scrubbing’ feature that actually began wiping off all the data. When they realized what was happening, they pulled the plug and called us, figuring they had wiped the drives.
“The hospital system contained 25 hard disk drives with 9GB of data each, which was a lot back then. We proceeded to find out what had gone wrong. We also had their backup tapes.
“The good news was, it takes longer than 15 minutes to wipe 230 gigs and at CBL, our glass is always half full, so we went after the data that wasn’t wiped.
“The objective was the pharmacy data, which outlined what medicine was to be issued to what patients in what doses throughout the day. Without this information, they had no idea what medication would have to be dispensed on New Year’s Day.
“The biggest challenge was, when we contacted HP people throughout North America, no one clearly understood the scrub function.
“Our next step was to investigate the backup tapes, created by a robotic Exebyte tape machine with two readers in a $50,000 box full of eight-millimetre tape. We took the box apart and discovered one of the readers was fried, so we took the working reader and went through each tape individually.
“Eventually, we got about 90 per cent of the hard disk drives and the other 10 per cent from the tape, thanks to a conscientious new employee who had backed it up.”
Back That Thang Up
“Back it up.” It’s the Margeson Mantra, the CBL Creed. It applies to the world’s biggest companies and the individual home PC user equally.
“What can go wrong will go wrong! Even backups can fail. You can treat your computer with all the love and tenderness in the world but eventually something will go wrong, whether it’s hardware failure, virus, human error or natural disaster. Be prepared. Data backup should be a habit. But even if something does go wrong, don’t panic. Usually something can be done.”
Margeson practices what he preaches. In fact, the first step of every data recovery case is backing up the damaged system so initial work is done on the copy and not the original. Once the key has been found and the trapped data unlocked, only then do they touch the original.
It’s an approach that has served him and CBL partners Zhengong Chang and Simon Lam from the beginning.
“I started the company in 1993 by purchasing an existing computer repair business that had been working out of 2,500 square feet of rented warehouse space. Our front door was the warehouse unit’s back door, beside the dumpster and the loading dock. As such, our location attracted all kinds of interesting clientele.
“Our original idea was to provide cheap, no-frills repair services to the IT community in Markham, but we quickly began to see that, as important as the hardware is, the data’s more important than the device. You can replace your computer, but you can’t replace data.”
It was a revelation that would restructure CBL’s corporate destiny. Even with statistical evidence staring them in the face, bold-type operator’s manual warnings, all the horror stories about Blue Screens of Death — people simply did not back up their data.
CBL saw that as an opportunity to run a successful business by recovering data from crashed computers. For 1994, that was a questionable business plan. But it didn’t take long for Bill to realize it would work, big time.
“Our first big customer was a large cellular provider in Toronto. As the lab opened at 8 a.m. one morning, five men were waiting anxiously outside with a disk drive that contained millions of dollars worth of customer billing information.
“By 3 p.m., Chang and I were at their offices hooking up the recovered drive. When it was clear the data was back and live, a cheer went up in the company’s control room.”
The cell company had come within a whisker of disaster. Had they learned their lesson? Nope.
“The first thing they wanted to do was use the data right away,” Margeson remembers. “We said, ‘Guys, guys. Do you want the same thing to happen again? Back it up first!’”
But it was not until the next case that Margeson realized the lucrative potential of rescuing information.
“There was a comptroller for five companies who came in looking to repair a drive that contained all of the accounting data. Toshiba had replaced the computer completely! He was horrified.
“It was a rush job and we had to buy a new Toshiba drive, which back then cost $1,300. We spent 20 minutes with it and treated it like the crown jewels.”
Global Recovery
CBL quickly became a local legend — a data-recovery SWAT team that fielded business 911 calls, swooped in, rescued the data and ran off to the next crisis. Quite a reputation, but it wasn’t until the Internet took off in the mid-’90s that CBL’s talent and business philosophy would literally reach around the world.
“We went online during the early days of the Web and by 1996 had set up shop in England,” Margeson says. “Customer demand from Britain had come about because of our initial online presence. People would do a word search for ‘data recovery’ and there we were,
cbltech.com.
“Since then, we haven’t looked back. Germany followed, then Barbados. Now we have 11 labs in 10 countries, including two in the United States. Singapore has taken off very quickly and Japan has just come online. Again, it’s because there’s a demand generated by our Web presence.”
But all sorts of companies with huge Web presence have failed. It’s one thing to have a good business concept and strong marketing. But ultimately, the process of data recovery demands keen minds able to crack codes without accepting failure. Margeson’s ability to find such sleuths reveals much about his own problem-solving skills.
“Over the years, we have found people with PhDs and other high levels of education, particularly in the Chinese community, repairing computer monitors and working in restaurants. For example, one of our key people is Yi Mei Cao, a former professor of C language in China. She has a PhD, but we ran into her in Toronto’s Chinatown assembling computers in a store. The rest are mavericks, self-taught folks who love a challenge and have unique dispositions, courage and determination.”
“In data recovery, you need a rebellious attitude and that’s what keeps us awake in the middle of the night. When Microsoft says ‘No, you can’t do that,’ we say, ‘Piss off.’ It could be a Scarborough thing too.”
The Scarborough thing. Toronto’s working-class eastern suburb. NHL tough guys Bryan Marchment and Kris Draper hail from Scarborough; so does Bill Margeson. You don’t mess with them and they don’t back down from a challenge.
“We were once presented with an optical jukebox with 250 cartridges, 2.6 gigs each side, operating in a machine bigger than a refrigerator. The client had been in the process of doing a backup and had brought in cartridges from off-site when a flood hit. The jukebox was contaminated and all of the off-site backups were damaged as well.
“That left us with hundreds of cartridges contaminated by muddy floodwater. We had to recover every cartridge individually. Three days later, we had all of the data. That was the toughest job because of the dirt and water and the inherent challenges of dealing with an optical jukebox. We had to do 251 recoveries and then everything en masse once they were functional. But we did it.”
Tackling big challenges can include taking on unusual clients. Margeson recalls the time a Costa Rican e-casino called for help after its servers had been seized, encrypted and held for ransom by a Russian hacker group. The company paid the ransom but could not decrypt one of the servers, even with the hackers’ help. CBL had to write sophisticated new software to recover the data, which included 60GB of credit card information.
As Good as it Can Get
Margeson politely declines to list his clients, known to include some of the biggest corporations and most powerful government branches in Canada and the United States.
“Many of the Fortune 500 won’t publicly announce that they have asked for our services, because usually it means they made a mistake somewhere in their continuity planning or business processes,” says Margeson.
“As for the smaller customers, we believe no one should be held hostage by technology. We have a program where students and non-profits pay for our services with a souvenir such as T-shirt from their school.”
But CBL doesn’t claim a perfect record.
“We have been stumped, but it’s usually a matter of time constraints. We are unable to puzzle out the problem within the customer’s set deadline. On average, 85 per cent of the time we recover all the data. The rest of the time we get at least partial results unless there’s no magnetic signal left or the drive has melted into puddle of goop. But you never know until you try, and we always try.”
As the motto says on the CBL home page, “When you need data recovery now, you need the best.”
Quite a claim, but something that CBL can clearly back up.
www.cbltech.com
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