Local ISV bags US retail deal

Australian data recovery software developed by two former police forensic investigators and one physicist is being launched this month into the United States retail market.

GetData's RecoverMyFiles, already in six European territories and Japan, is going into 1000 US retail stores this week, including CompUSA, Fry's Electronics and Micro Center.

The software was developed in 18 months by former Federal Police forensic investigator Graham Henley, former state police investigator John Hunter with a physicist, Dr Brett Hunter.

John Hunter and Henley have investigated a lot of computer crime and helped on the investigations into failed corporations HIH, FAI and One.Tel.

Henley told iTnews the US$69.95 software was unique, because it searched for deleted files based on their file structure rather than name or extension.

It could also recover data from formatted hard drives. When users downloaded the demonstration online they could view the contents of their deleted files.

"No one else does that. We actually show the user the contents of the deleted file," he said.

Other data recovery offerings on the market were "dreadful", Henley said.

John Hunter said computer forensics was about finding IT evidence no one knew was there.

"We always believed our data recovery techniques had commercial possibilities. As long as a deleted file hasn't been overwritten, it can be recovered. We have developed a unique approach that means our data recovery engine can find deleted files that conventional programs would never know existed."

The company, based in Loftus in Sydney, had 50,000 users worldwide. The trio started the business full time in July 2003.

GetData expected to do US$3 million in worldwide sales for its financial year ending 30 June 2005. The US retail deals were worth around US$250,000.

RecoverMyFiles was compatible with Windows XP and works with FAT 12, FAT 16, FAT 32 and NTFS file systems. It had support for some 100 file types including deleted Zip, PDF, AutoCAD, Photoshop and tax files, the company said.