Data Refugee

Data Refugee is a Ruby on Rails site that allows customers to submit and track their damaged hard drives for data recovery online. We built a user interface where customers can view the current status of the recovery, upcoming steps, invoices, payments and file list previews in addition to sending and receiving messages. On the custom-built backend, the admin can view, edit and take actions on all data recoveries in the system. Admins can also upload any files to Amazon's S3 file store using a direct uploader which bypasses the server's resources. This means that if the admin had to upload a large file that took 15 minutes to upload with a normal setup, it would have tied up one server process for the entire 15 minutes. With our solution, the server process is never required until after the upload completes.

Data Refugee uses MongoDB for its database backend with the Mongoid adapter, and achieves most of its functionality with only two document models. It uses the PDFKit plugin for on demand generation of PDF files for printable invoices and reciepts. Payments are processed securely with Paypal Payments Standard using custom payment and notification code. Invoices are automatically generated after a customer has approved the data recovery. Line items are added and their values are totaled based on the type of services selected by the customer. Receipts are automatically generated after confirmation from Paypal is recieved and verified. Data Refugee is deployed on Heroku and is ready to scale on a minute's notice.