Data loss in paradise.

Feb 16, 2020

The situation

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, imaged the hard drives and rebuilt the RAID.

The client originally contacted VMware for support.

According to Alfred Christoffersen, manager of Uprising Beach Resort, the server contained every single record of their operations since the day that they opened. “We did have an external backup” explains Christoffersen, “but it was a month out of date.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 reentered a lot of the missing data manually but it would have taken weeks and we didn’t have that kind of time.” Uprising Beach Resort contacted Datec Fiji Limited who Christoffersen described as being Fiji’s biggest and best IT company. Datec Fiji Limited are a part of Ontrack’s Authorised Partner network, and after working on the server for 8 hours, they referred the case to Ontrack. “I called Ontrack after their business hours and got through to an automated voice service. I left a message and within 30 minutes, Adrian Briscoe, the Managing Director, called me back” says Christoffersen.

The solution

Ontrack assembled a team of three data recovery engineers and two developers in order to provide the fastest possible recovery.

The Ontrack developers quickly created the tools needed to improve the success of the recovery. After only a few hours, the first virtual machine was rebuilt allowing for the extraction of the Exchange databases to be returned to the customer. The team continued to rebuild all of the critical virtual machines until the client’s email was back in production. At the end of the project, a total of 15TB of data was recovered with minimal downtime for the client.

The resolution

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

When asked about the service, Christoffersen said “communication was great I would say, there was response and we didn’t have to sit around the resort waiting for communication or having to chase updates ourselves - we were informed about what was happening every step of the way.” Christoffersen continues on to state that Ontrack scored “10 out of 10 - communication, speed, response, recovery. I would definitely recommend their services to other businesses.”