ZDNet Australia reports that an internal email about the outage stated that: "The back-ups were affected by an underlying, undetected software problem that had been damaging the back-ups for a number of months."

According to the EnergyAustralia website , they are "one of Australia's largest gas and electricity suppliers with 100 years experience" and they deliver services "to over 1.5 million Australian homes and businesses".

Fujitsu (their contractor) and EnergyAustralia spent the Christmas and New Year period trying to recover the lost files from a number of drives. After discovering just how many files were missing, they are now working on a second restoration attempt, to new hardware, in order to prevent overwriting files already recovered.

They are hopeful about this second recovery attempt, expecting it to deliver a more comprehensive restoration of the backup tapes of 12 December. However they have warned their users that some of the recovered versions of files may be weeks or even months old. They have also warned that a range of documents may need to be recreated.

Neither EnergyAustralia or Fujitsu are willing to comment on their roles in the incident or to state who had the responsibility for backups of the SAN.

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ZDNet Australia - EnergyAustralia suffers back-up catastrophe