Recovery is only the beginning.
At John Bordynuik, Inc., we are equipped to help our clients with one of the central dilemmas of data recovery and management: Data is only useful if it is stored in a form that can be easily accessed and manipulated. And so, recovering information from our clients’ now-obsolete computer-output media is only the first step.
The raw data must then be migrated and stored in a long-term data storage format. JBI accomplishes this in a 3 step migration process.
During the data recovery process, our custom hardware gives us the capacity to capture a digitized image of the tape signal -- or information -- written on any form of media, much in the same way that hard drives are imaged today. In addition to the raw data itself, this replica of the information contained on the original media format also includes all source code used to input, organize and store the data. This code is valuable for explaining what the data is and how it should be understood.
Once a complete image of the data has been produced, this information is fed into our Swahili Engine, which is a software component we designed just for this purpose. The Swahili Engine normalizes the data extracted, taking the ambiguous set of bits that has been imaged, and translates it into a useful format that can be read and understood by today’s computers.
The Swahili Engine separates the data that was saved from the code related to how it was saved and creates a record of both sets of information. For clients attempting to make sense of data gathered as long as four decades ago, knowing how the data came to be collected and stored can be as useful as the data itself. These additional details often provide valuable context for the data that has been recovered, including the date and location at which it was originally inputted and clues as to how the data was intended to be grouped and processed.
The final step of normalizing the data involves saving it in a format that can be easily searched and manipulated by our clients using their current technology. For example, it is possible to take a document created in Wordstar, the dominant word processing application of the 1980s, and convert it into a Word document. And, should Word someday become obsolete, we can translate our clients’ raw data into a format that can be read by whatever the next word processing platform might be.
For those in the natural gas and oil industries, we can also translate well log data and oil and gas seismic records into whatever formats our clients may request.
All of the data we present to our clients is fully searchable, including all of the information saved on the original tape labels and the tapes themselves.
What good is information if it is not accessible because it is stored in a medium that can no longer be opened or accessed? This is the common problem for many organizations who have data that they have not been able to migrate forward as they have grown and matured.
The methods of storing data improved and evolved at a rapid rate. Computers and their data management solutions had only 6 month development cycles. The "next generation" of technologies that were more stable, had larger capacity, and cost less, were constantly arriving. The original equipment used to write millions of tapes quickly became extinct. Organizations were left with data on fragile media and no original equipment left to access this data with. The in-house technology and processes developed by JBI provide a solution to this problem, allowing organizations to access all their past data.
.jpg)
"At John Bordynuik, Inc., we are equipped to help our clients with one of the central dilemmas of data recovery and management: Data is only useful if it is stored in a form that can be easily accessed and manipulated."