case study
Three weeks following the fire the school was set up in a temporary location with all of its student and staff data intact .
days . Now the process is completed in a matter of a few hours and I receive an email telling me the back up is complete , which gives me great peace of mind .’
In case of emergency : 100 per cent data restored On the 21st August 2016 , a fire broke out at the school . The fire swiftly grew out of control and within a matter of hours , the school was engulfed in flames .
By the time the fire had been put out , the school had been reduced to a smouldering heap of twisted metal and concrete . Eighty per cent of the school was destroyed . All servers in their racks , the network itself , as well as the building they were stored in had been destroyed .
The media reported heavily on the incident as the school was set to return from summer holidays in just a couple of weeks . Following the fire , a BBC news story wrote that ‘ electronic pupil records were being restored from a cloud based storage system ’. The cloud based storage system in question was Redstor ’ s cloud back up platform . Daniel credits Redstor with having provided exactly the assistance that was needed in such an emergency .
He said , ‘ After the fire , my attention was drawn to the confidential student and staff data that we hold . It goes without saying that I don ’ t even want to think about what the consequences of completely losing all that information would have been . The headteacher called me up at 6pm that evening to ask if we had backed up all student data and it was clearly a relief that we had .’
Within just two hours Daniel was able to restore all critical student and staff data residing within SIMS using a high speed broadband connection . All less critical data was restored in an additional 8-10 hours . The only reason it wasn ’ t faster was a low speed USB external hard drive was used for part of the restore process .
‘ Using online back up was clearly a huge benefit in this particular incident ,’ says Daniel . ‘ If we had still been using the tape based back ups it would have taken significantly longer if it had worked at all , as the servers would have had to be rebuilt in order to complete a restore . A member of the Redstor team offered to visit us on site and was able to assist us with a full restore which made the process a lot smoother .’
Three weeks following the fire , after the start of the new school year , the school was set up in a temporary location with all of its student and staff data intact . Daniel credits the community and support from The Kemnal Academies Trust ( TKAT ) as well as Redstor for their help in quickly getting things ready for the students to return .
‘ It has been an unusual time for our students and could have been a distraction from schoolwork . We ’ ve worked to ensure the return to school is as smooth and stress free as possible . That ’ s much easier as we ’ ve not lost data ,’ says Daniel .
He concludes , ‘ This is my first time dealing with an incident of this scale but I ’ m glad we took the precautions of choosing Redstor ’ s online data back up as it really takes away from the stress of trying to get the school up and running again .’
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