Bmda: Trademarks lost in computer crash

Half of the 37,000 registered trademarks in Bermuda have been lost from the computerised Trademark Registry following a crash, The Royal Gazette can reveal.

A back-up system which is supposed to rebuild the database failed, meaning only half of the computerised information was restored.

Staff at the Registry General have had to go back to original files and manually input all data from 1999 – around half the 37,000 trademarks.

The computer crash will be an embarrassment to Government which is marketing Bermuda as a leading e-business and intellectual property centre.

The failure occurred about three weeks ago and it has forced the Registry General to suspend processing of new trademark registrations.

And lawyers acting for companies which have registered their trademarks can’t search the system to see if their intellectual property has been protected.

Registry General staff are hoping to have a basic service resumed in two weeks.


When a drive experiences problems, it is replaced and the system continues as normal but in this case the system didn’t recover as normal.

This caused IT experts to turn to back-up copies to repair the RAID drives, but they failed because the back-up copy of the file needed was not available because of “system configuration changes” performed at an earlier date.

So, did it take them three weeks to figure out the information wasn't recoverable? Why is the world hearing about this only now? What measures have they used to recover this information? Sounds like a really novice error caused the recovery to be less than 100%.