CnW Recovery 2004 - 2024....
Having left eMag Solutions I wanted a project. Ideally one I knew something about, but not one that cause a conflict of interest with eMag Solutions.
The very first plan was for CD recovery. The thought behind this was due to an instance while on a weekend photographic course. One of the students tried to add her photos to a CD and ended up erasing the existing photos. With my laptop, a bit of lateral thinking, and use of InterMedia for Windows I managed to recover her photos. I started work on a new program, CnW Recovery that just processed CDs. As before, I used Visual Studio (2003) and MFC working on a new InterMedia/eMag sourced XP based PC. I actually still have it basically unchanged except for updated hard drives. Still on XP.
After a few weeks I had a request to recover a FAT32 hard drive - and so I started to develop software to process FAT32. Next drive was NTFS, so this was added. At this point, the main method of working was to read the physical sectors in such a way that if a sector(s) was unreadable, the recovery process would continue.
Development continued to include disk imaging, and data carving. The disk imaging was at the time unusal in that I could build up an image in sections rather than starting at sector 0 and going on to the end. This way meant that areas of a failing disk could be skipped and effort concentrated on getting as much good data as possible. The difficult areas where then tackled later with many more retries, and only if the actual sector was required. Overall a prcess to try and extract as much data as possible with the least possible damage to the drive. If the drive would not read, I would have to pass on the job.
After about 1 year of time, the software was good enough to be sold, and so I started online sales via internet and using PayPal for world wide sales. I priced the software in US $ as more European customers would probably accept US $ than Americans accepting anything foreign.
In the early 2000s, the market was big and drives not totally reliable. With fairly low pricing, sales went well with licences ultimately ranging from $19.99 for 30 days to $159.99 for a full forensic version.