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

In a statement to , Registrar General Marlene Christopher apologised for the inconvenience caused.

?A concerted effort is being made by the staffs of the Registry General and Information Technology Office to reinstate lost data so that the Department is fully operational within the next two weeks,? she said.

?We are indebted to those staff members who are working late into the evenings to ensure that the projected deadline for the resumption of services is met. Continuing efforts are being made to dispense with backlogs created during this time.

?We in the Registry General recognise the inconvenience to our local and international clients resulting from the suspension of services and are committed to the retention of the goodwill of our clients and the overall reputation of intellectual property practice in Bermuda.?

Lawyer Graham Wood, an intellectual property specialist with Appleby Spurling and Kemp, told : ?We had a meeting and they told us the measures they are taking to recover the situation and they will be re-inputting the data that has been lost.

?Hopefully they will have the Registry up to speed in two weeks, and that is with the bare bones of data, not the full details.

?It seems they lost one file, but it was a critical file and the end result appears to be that they have to go back to the latest back up dated 1999 because the other back-ups had failed, so they are going to re-input all data since 1999.

?It is preventing us operating a normal service and the trademark sector relies entirely on the Trademark Registry.

?You can?t do a search to see if there are any conflicting marks. If they can get the bare bones back again in two weeks time we will be able to operate again and provide services to our clients.

?Trademarks are very valuable property and without the Trademark Registry, businesses are put into a difficult position with regard to protecting their valuable property, and also that they are not infringing on anyone else?s property.

?The damage done has been minimal because they have been able to recover the situation so quickly, but it its unfortunate.?

He said Bermuda had a large trademark sector for the size of the jurisdiction although it as nowhere near as big the United States or Britain.

Head of Information Technology Michael Oatley said one file that makes up the Trademark Registry database was lost.

?Using back up copies and programming, it was possible to reconstruct the file up to about 50 percent complete,? he said.

?The remaining details on the file are being reconstructed manually from hard copy files and should be complete within two weeks.

?While established measures to mitigate against such problems have proven 100 percent reliable to date ? with the exception of this event ? additional control measures have been instituted in the change control procedures to guard against similar problems in the future.?

He said Government files are normally stored on RAID (redundant array of independent discs) to reduce the risk of error on a single drive.

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.