RAID 5 data recovery for tropical resort

When Uprising Beach Resort in Fiji experienced a problem with their RAID configured server, they knew that they had to act quickly.

Uprising Beach Resort’s IBM server with a RAID 5 comprising of 5 SCSI hard drives failed. When the hard drives arrived at the Brisbane cleanroom it was found that one of the mirrored operating drives had failed with internal mechanical faults. The second OS was also reporting bad sectors. Ontrack took the three hard drives that constituted the data volume, images the hard drives and rebuilt the RAID.

According to Alfred Christoffersen, Manager of Uprising Beach Resort, the server contained every single record of their operations since the day that they opened – property management, reservations, accounting, reporting and revenue, payroll – everything. “We did have an external backup” explains Christoffersen, “but it was a month out of date. Restoring it was not an option because it would not have had the last months’ worth of data and reservations – we could have re-entered a lot of the missing data manually but it would have taken weeks and we didn’t have that kind of time.” “I called Ontrack for a RAID data recovery after their business hours and got through to an automated voice service. I left a message and within 30 minutes, Adrian Briscoe, the Office Manager, called me back” says Christoffersen.

By that stage, Uprising Beach Resort’s server had been out of operation for a full day and they were starting to run out of time. There wasn’t enough time to wait for couriers so the hard drives were put on a plane with a staff member and flown to Brisbane. They arrived in the Ontrack office and clean room facility at approximately 3pm in the afternoon, and within two hours the client was given confirmation that the data was recoverable.

“From speaking to the client, I knew that his business would be in serious trouble if data was not restored quickly” explains Adrian Briscoe. “Due to our ‘follow the sun’ support abilities, our local engineers were able to image the hard drives and then send the images to teams in Europe and the US where they pieced the RAID back together. The critical data was then uploaded to the FTP and made available for the client to download.”

The raid 5 recovery was 100% successful and every single file that was on the server was able to be recovered.