Server goes on trip around Europe to Ibas in Norway

Many council workers in St Gallen were amazed when they could no longer access their data and their passwords no longer worked. The cause of the problem was what the experts called a 'logical' error in the server's file system, which caused it to crash. Some 100 of the PC workstations on the council's network of 800 only had limited access to data, and could not access all files.

The backup didn't help
Computer scientists would say that there must have been a backup they could have used to bring the server back up again. And there was, but it was incomplete, so some of the data could not be retrieved at all. Hansruedi Dietsche, the head of the town's organisation and IT office, decided first to try a recovery program from a well-known network software provider. "I was amazed that it took nearly two weeks to run through about two thirds of the recovery routine." The council decided that they couldn't wait any longer, and at the end of the day, it was not a secure enough solution anyway.

Then the men came down form the North
Enter the security specialists Ibas to come to the council's rescue in their hour of need - and "physically" rescue the actual data. François Tschachtli, the manager of the Swiss office, offered to send the server back to the Ibas laboratory in Norway, where they could recreate the data. Tschachtli: "For us, it was a time-critical challenge - the data was needed urgently in St Gallen. And of course, it was also a technical challenge to us, the data recovery specialists". Once the decision to send the server to Norway was made in St Gallen, an amazingly tight schedule began.

Less than a week
The server was couriered to the Ibas laboratories in Norway. Once it arrived, a status report was generated to determine whether the lost data could really be retrieved. The laboratory reports backed up the decision to attempt recovery. One day later, all the data had been recovered, and another day later the computer was back in St Gallen. Even Hansruedi Dietsche was impressed by the service: "Two days of travel, three days of work, and we've got all our data back". The individual access permissions had to be reallocated, and other administration work had to be carried out on the network. "Everything else is working, we're very proud of it.