Imré Antal, founder of Chronodisk
Meet the creator of Chronodisk, Imré Antal
As a former editor-in-chief of several multimedia magazines (PC Jeux, CD-Rom Magazine, Amiga Concept, Console News…), I often came across readers of my magazines, or users who had fallen victim to data loss. I found it unacceptable that you had to pay an average of 3,000 francs to get a quote from a specialist — a quote that took a week to arrive, with no detailed written report, just a phone call. And if the recovery turned out to be impossible, you had lost that 3,000 francs anyway. Data itself cost several hundred francs per megabyte!
Drawing on my experience in the world of computing, and on the thousands of specialised software programs and pieces of hardware I had been able to test during my career as a journalist, I asked myself what kind of data recovery service I, as a consumer, would want to find when contacting a company in this field.
The story of Chronodisk
Chronodisk is a 100% French data recovery laboratory, founded in 2005 in Issy-les-Moulineaux (92), then relocated to Paris (75) in 2007, and finally established in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) in 2011. ISO 9001-2008 Quality Certification was obtained in 2013, and the new 9001-2015 standard was also validated during 2018. The laboratory was founded by Imré Antal (press card no. 76972), editor-in-chief and creator of numerous computer magazines (Amiga Concept, Amiga Wave, CD-Rom Magazine, CD-Concept, PC Jeux…).
Until 2004, the few companies specialising in data recovery, mostly American, took advantage of their near-monopoly by charging more than 300 euros just for a quote! You then had to wait a week to receive it. Data recovery packages, often very opaque, frequently exceeded 5,000 euros for a single hard drive, and could go beyond 50,000 euros for RAID arrays made up of several hard drives. Imré Antal and his team went on to create and establish their 100% free diagnostic quote, guaranteed within 2 to 6 hours in the lab for business clients. 12 years on, this express quote remains a Chronodisk exclusive, particularly for RAID drives, which elsewhere are typically diagnosed over several days and still cost several hundred euros.