Thousands of people had their lives turned upside down when freak weather conditions caused havoc across South and East Yorkshire this past summer. In late June of 2007 strong winds and torrential rain caused flooding to levels rarely seen in the UK. The newspapers were dominated by headlines of homes destroyed and the cost of the destruction to the insurance industry, but less attention was given to the potentially devastating impact that the flooding had on businesses across the region.

Once such company was Mexborough based Morphy Richards. Trevor Burrows, IT Director, Morphy Richards said: "The ferociousness of the weather in Yorkshire saw our 21 acre site flooded by six foot of water within two hours. In total about 138 of our PCs were destroyed. Fortunately the majority of our business critical data was backed up and safe. But there were some of these computers that were storing files that hadn't yet been backed up that day"

Wanting to act fast to retrieve as much of the lost information as possible, Morphy Richards contacted local re-seller Q-tron, which had previously worked with the company providing network and IT Support. Q-tron had many years experience of developing, implementing and supporting innovative applications built in a wide range of technologies. The company's experience allowed it to provide the most accurate problem solving solution to its clients. As such Q-tron was quick to put Morphy Richards in touch with its partner Seagate Recovery Services, knowing that an operation of this scale would need the expertise of data recovery specialists.

As soon as it was possible to re-access the flooded site, the team at Morphy Richards quickly gathered the hard drives and Seagate Recovery Services got to work immediately.

"Our first job," said Jacob Ekker, Marketing manager, EMEA for Seagate Recovery Services, "was to get the hard drives sent by secure transport from the Morphy Richards office in Mexborough to our facility in Amsterdam. From the minute the drives are taken from a company, their security must be guaranteed as we use a courier company with its own dedicated driver, handling service and access to airport."

Once at the lab in Amsterdam, Seagate's data recovery experts were tasked with making an assessment of the damage within 24 hours. The biggest issue was to clean the hard drives. Given the time spent submerged in water, each machine required cleaning with an ultrasonic solution, taking each piece out one by one. This was a mission critical task and all the lab's resources were put towards getting it done as quickly as possible. Six technicians worked 24 hours a day for the first three days to complete the initial part of the process.

Next on the agenda was to evaluate each drive one by one. Jacob said: "From header problems to surface damage, corrosion on the platters and system area damage - we saw it all, and knew it would have to be dealt with to a very tight schedule to maximise our opportunity of retrieving as much information as possible."

Having ordered all the parts, the lab team were divided into three groups with one preparing the hard drives and two others recovering the information. Everything was then stored on an external hard-drive, which could connect to any other machine.

Working to save the information, Seagate Recovery Services ensured that all but one of the hard-drives had had its data restored. "For us, reputation is everything and to be able to assist Morphy Richards in getting back to normal operations as soon as possible had a great impact on our future success," said Jacob.

With just one drive left that was not recoverable by traditional techniques, Morphy Richards agreed to try a new technology called Signal Trace, which had been developed by Seagate. This method of reading data without a drive involved taking the platters out and reconstructing the data using proprietary algorithms. With permission from Morphy Richards, the drive was sent to Seagate's specialist Recovery Services lab in Toronto, where the data was able to be recovered within a month. "No other data recovery facility has the level of technology required to do this," said Jacob.

Trevor Burrows at Morphy Richards added: "When the worst happens, you expect to experience a fairly significant level of disruption to your business and of course it took us a while to get systems back to normal. We had the systems in place to back-up and restore our mission critical data but thanks to Seagate we were able to retrieve those important bits and pieces stored locally that scheduled back-ups had not yet reached. I would recommend Seagate's efforts to any other business that finds itself in a similar situation."

NOTES TO EDITORS

The Seagate Services Group, a division of Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) specializes in storage management solutions which protect and manage businesses' most valuable information. Built on the most advanced technologies, SaaS, managed services, and licensed software offerings are delivered, deployed, and managed in flexible ways to suit small to large businesses' unique needs. The Seagate Services Group is comprised of three business units: Data Protection (EVault) for comprehensive data software and outsourced protection solutions for backup, recovery, archiving and business continuity, Recovery Services (Seagate Recovery Services) for data recovery, data migration and collection services; and E-Discovery (MetaLINCS and EVault Insight) for enterprise software and hosted solutions for intelligent E-Discovery.

CONTACT: ,Sarah Thomas / Richard Warner, Spreckley Partners Tel: +44 (0)207 388 9988 e-mail: thomas@spreckley.co.uk WWW: http://warner@spreckley.co.uk Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) WWW: http://services.seagate.com