eMag helps the Police
eMag was recently asked to help the police with a high profile criminal case dating from the mid 1980s that was being re-investigated. Although the police had many records relating to the case, some were part of a database that had been generated on a system that is no longer available. To make matters worse, although the data was properly backed up, it was on 8″ floppy disks that were not in a standard format. In other words they were not DOS or CP/M.

Fortunately, the police contacted eMag after seeing on eMag’s InterMedia web site that we could handle 8″ disks. Their initial hope was that we could just stream the raw data off, but after bringing the disk to one of our state of the art Conversion Service Centers, eMag was able to make it possible to read the disks logically and extract the database as ‘real’ files. This enabled the police to have the files processed by a modern system and so access data that was recorded over 15 years ago.

Since 1983 eMag has handled nearly 2,000 different floppy disk formats, from 3″ to 8″, in our state of the art Conversion Service Centers. And with the purchase of InterMedia in June 2000, eMag continued to increase our expertise in handling both old and new magnetic media – mainly with the tape only product MediaMerge/PC. The present MM/PC software is used extensively in the forensic world to read tapes of unknown origin and format, and it is discussed in more detail in the article below.