Posing with ugly sweaters and animal costumes, these are the people who were tasked with securely storing Hillary Clinton's sensitive emails from when she was Secretary of State.

Staff at Datto Inc are seen laughing while wearing costumes including Gandalf, a Star Trek character and stereotypes of Mexicans.

Photos posted onto the Facebook page of the the computer data storage company also show employees lounging in dressing gowns on pajama day.

An investigation by Daily Mail Online has revealed that concerns have been raised in the past about Datto which may well have raised eyebrows among Clinton's team.

A senior executive was allegedly able to steal sensitive information from the company's systems after she was fired.

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Safe in his hands: This is Austin McChord, the man who founded and operates Datto Inc. Its cloud servers were used to back up Hillary Clinton's private email server - Clintonmail - which she used as Secretary of State. He encourages Nerf gun battles in the offices and used them to inaugurate a new floor in one of them

Opportunity for women: The firm's summer 2015 party featured 'island dancers' as part of its theme, on hand to dance with its male employees

In safe hands: Datto Inc claims to offer secure storage solutions and has seen its business expand rapidly, allowing it to hire these dancers for its summer 2015 party. It is now part of an FBI probe into Clinton's server

Covered-up: Founder Austin McChord (center) was among those who took part in a competition for the worst jersey before Christmas. The 'Steve Jobs' of storage is a fan of Nerf guns (right)

Part of the fun: Employees dressed in stereotypical Mexican outfits to mark Cinco De Mayo this year

FBI focus: Hillary Clinton, photographed on the campaign trail in Iowa yesterday, has the agency looking at her email use after the disclosure of her private server while she was Secretary of State

Hackers managed to completely take over a Datto storage device, allowing them to steal whatever data they wanted.

Datto's founder Austin McChord has been described as the 'Steve Jobs of Disaster Recovery' - and once admitted talking to customers with a British accent to sound more convincing.

Datto was revealed by McClatchy earlier this week as the company contracted by Denver-based Platte River Systems to back up Clinton's emails after she left office in 2013.

The report paints a chaotic picture of how it was carried out, which is alarming as some of the messages were later classified as Top Secret.

Clinton is being investigated by the FBI to see whether her use of a private server when she was in office between 2009 and 2013 breached rules on handling of classified data.

A Senate committee is also looking into the scandal, which is dogging Clinton's presidential run and harming her trust with voters.

The focus of the investigation is increasingly turning to what happened to the server Clinton had been using and had been keeping at her home in Chappaqua, upstate New York.

When she left office she hired Platte River, who in turn hired Datto to maintain and back it up.

Daily Mail Online can reveal that Datto employees have a maverick attitude and see themselves as 'disrupters' of a staid industry.

Nowhere can their attitude be more apparent than their Facebook page which features pictures of them drinking and socializing at their annual conferences in Las Vegas.

Staff also go on golfing trips and donned ugly sweaters and Mexican-style hats as they goofed about in front of the camera.

For their summer party this year they hired a fire dancer and a troupe of female Hawaiian-style dancers to entertain them as they drank beers on the beach.

The irreverent attitude was not shared by all employees though, and a lawsuit shines a light on tensions within Datto and its security procedures.

The case was brought by Katie Braband, who Datto recruited from investment bank UBS to be its vice president for sales and development in February 2009.

She was their third employee at what at the time was still a small startup company.

Braband and Datto's founder Austin McChord did not get on and he claimed there was 'numerous acts of insubordination' that led to his decision to fire her.

For her part Braband claimed that McChord reneged on a stock sharing scheme and told her she was 'mentally unstable' and 'had to take Prozac before coming to work'.

Braband was suspended in September 2010 and fired in November of that year.

According to Datto's lawsuit: 'Braband removed or retained several files and other data and information belonging to the Company following the termination of her employment, including but not limited to files assembled on competitors.

'She also accessed Datto's CRM database without authorization following her termination, and accessed, copied, and maliciously deleted customer contact information and irreplaceable customer history therein'.

Lobby: The respectable front desk at the Datto Inc offices in Rochester, New York. But the company is keen on dressing up and being a 'disrupter' to the data storage market

In the money: Founder Austin McChord has seen his company expand from being in his own, living with his parents and putting on a fake British accent to answer the phone, to its current scale

Bitten off more than it can chew? Datto Inc employees, who dressed as Star Wars characters at a conference, were subcontracted by Platte River Services to back up the Clinton server. One Platte River employee emailed another saying they feared 'shaddy (sic) s***).

In her response Braband admitted that she had 'deleted certain electronic data' on the Datto database but claimed she restored it later.

The case was settled in 2012 and the terms were not made public. Braband did not return calls asking for comment.

Among the others who have raised concerns about security with Datto products have been Silent Break Security, an independent Internet security company.

In a post earlier this year Silent Break described how it cracked a Datto storage device given to it by one of its clients using basic passwords.

It's a really serious hack, and one that's going to push me far away from these devices Reddit user after disclosure that a Datto device had been compromised by independent security firm

From there they were able to gain access to their client's entire data network and potentially do harm to their system.

The post sparked a debate on Reddit and while the response from Datto was praised by many commenters, some were sharply critical of the company

One wrote: 'This isn't just an edge case, this is something that's very straightforward to exploit. It doesn't just allow access to the device to compromise future backups. It's everything.

'Compromising the device would let an attacker take down an entire business for days while off-site backups are retrieved and restored. Employee's computers can be wiped, passwords stolen, user info easily taken, server architecture compromised or destroyed.

'It's a really serious hack, and one that's going to push me far away from these devices.'

Brady Bloxham, the founder of Silent Break, told Daily Mail Online that he was 'surprised' how easy it was to gain access to the Datto device.

He said that while he had not accessed Datto's main storage systems, which is where Clinton's emails would have been stored, his hack raised wider issues about the company.

Bloxham said: 'What happened (with Datto) was a classic case of unexpected growth.

What will Datto do? The firm, whose employees are encouraged to dress up at Halloween and other times of the year

Wizard idea: One employee dressed as Gandalf while another was in lederhosen for last year's Halloween party. In the following months the firm got the Clinton sub-contract and had one of its devices hacked

Live long and prosper: The firm believes that its fun approach is part of its long-term success

'I think Datto's growth took off more than they anticipated, to the point that they really didn't include proper security in their initial products.

'Now they are having to bring in a lot of mitigation after the fact.

'It's the classic mistake of IT companies that grow fast and don't include security in their initial product and end up paying for it later'.

Clinton is also paying for her decision to use a private server while in office, which she now admits was a mistake.

She has turned over 30,940 emails from when she was Secretary of State that she claims were all business related.

She has refused to do the same for another 30,000 because she says they are private and that she deleted them. Clinton also claimed that the server was wiped, but Platte River has revealed that is not the case.

The McClatchy report out this week adds further twists and suggests that, due to technical errors, Datto may have backed up her emails in two places, on a cloud-based storage and on another server.

The report also revealed that, as Platte River began to realize the mess it was involved in, and the State Department began asking Clinton for all of her emails, an employee at the tech company sent an email which read: 'This whole thing really is covering up some shaddy (sic) s***'.

Finding out where exactly Clinton's emails were actually stored is almost impossible, though it seems likely that there were multiples copies that were kept by Datto.

The company has two 'data fortresses' in rural Pennsylvania and Salt Lake City, Utah, the latter of which appears to be a collaboration with C7, another data storage company.

Not asleep on the job: In September last year the firm held a pajama day for its employees. This year one of its devices was compromosed

Sign of success: Datto Inc is in this office in Norwalk, CT, and its founder last year turned down a $100 million buyout offer. It is now part of the FBI probe into the Hillary Clinton server

Other data storage companies have just one major storage site but Datto incurs the extra cost of having another center in case that one fails.

Datta claims that its sites are monitored 24 hours a day and that staff have to gain entry with a retinal or palm scan.

Peter Hedge has made every single mistake in the company's history. In those days we had no idea what we were doing so we kept going Founder Austin McChord explains how he posed as fake Brit Peter Hedge and blamed errors on him. At the time he was living in his mom's basement

On its promotional literature it claims: 'Datto Has Never Lost Client Data and We Intend To Keep It That Way'.

The company was founded by McChord in 2008 in his parents' basement in Connecticut when he finished college.

McChord said in an interview that he had to move back home to save money and spent $80,000 on credit cards before things took off.

Seven years on and it has become a force in the data storage industry and what Forbes magazine called: 'The Secret Tech Money-Making Machine You've Never Heard Of'.

Datto now has 400 employees, five million clients worldwide and in 2014 McChord turned down an offer of $100 million to buy the company, which is based in Norwalk, Connecticut.

McChord, who was named as one of Forbes' '30 Under 30' standout executives this year, sees Datto as taking on the more established firms in the data storage industry, but it has been a bumpy ride.

A product called Aurora that was supposed to restore downed system in an hour crashed old machines, and had to be updated.

McChord now claims his latest software can bring a crashed system back online in six seconds.

In an interview with MSP Mentor he said that he starting out by buying lists of clients off the Internet and cold called them relentlessly until he got some sales.

As Datto grew McChord began to answer the phone with a British accent and the fictional name 'Peter Hedge'. Hedge would be blamed any time anything went wrong and became the company scapegoat.

An endorsement Hillary may not welcome: The firm posted a boast about how easy it was to get back deleted material. The Democratic candidate thought she had deleted all the emails she did not hand over but the FBI is now probing whether Datto inc still has them and may be interested by its boasts about easy recovery

Built to retain: The firm recently used a stunt at a trade fair to highlight how robust its systems were, dowsing a storage device in liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature just above -321F

McChord said in the interview: 'Peter Hedge has made every single mistake in the company's history. In those days we had no idea what we were doing so we kept going.'

A recent trademark infringement lawsuit shows that nowadays Datto has come a long way from its humble origins.

The company sued Washington-based Dato Inc and sent it a cease and desist letter to change its name because it claimed that consumers would get confused between the two companies.

Dato said in court papers that it was a software engineering company and that it was not a software backup firm.

It also claimed that Datto's customers were 'sophisticated' enough to see the difference between the two firms

Datto sued anyway and, according to the lawsuit, sent Dato an email which read: 'We just don't see a way for your company to use the DATO mark without causing confusion'.

The case is ongoing at the Western District of Washington State court in Seattle.

Lawyers for Dato did not return calls for comment.

Lots in common: Datto Inc was contracted to back up the Hillary Clinton server by Platte River Networks, whose employees held a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest party days before handing her wiped server to the FBI.

Daily Mail Online has previously revealed how Platte River, the company which hired Datto to help backup Mrs Clinton's emails, had a checkered history too.

At the time it was under contract with Clinton, Platte River was run from a loft apartment and its servers were housed in the bathroom closet.

Ex-employees of company said it had strong links to the Democratic Party but expressed shock that the 2016 presidential candidate chose the small private company for such a sensitive job.

One former staff member called it 'a mom and pop shop' which was an excellent place to work, but hardly seemed likely to be used to secure state secrets. The staff enjoyed a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest themed party.

A top executive at Platte River is also an alleged fraudster who was employed by one of the most notorious Ponzi fraudsters in recent history.