School burns down, but data recovered in hours with Redstor cloud solution

On-site data centre totalled - not a problem thanks to foresight of IT manager

A fire that burned a West Sussex school to the ground turned out to be no match for the institution's cloud data recovery solution, which had critical data restored hours after the blaze.

About 80 per cent of The Academy, Selsey was reduced to a "smouldering heap of twisted metal and concrete" by a fire that mercifully struck in August, during the summer holidays.

Servers, racks, the school's physical network and the building that acted as the data centre were all gutted.

Yet thanks to the foresight of IT manager Daniel Sapseid, who had overseen the backup of the school's data a year earlier in 2015, critical information escaped the disaster.

Previously, the school backed up data to tape.

"I would often leave the backup process to complete over the weekend and then would take the tapes home with me," said Sapseid.

"Looking back, I see it wasn't the most efficient way to store critical student data as a large part of my time was spent ensuring the backups had been completed in the first place."

Discovering Redstor's Backup Service for Schools (RBUSS) while attending the BETT show that year, Sapseid became convinced cloud was the way forward for backing up the Academy's critical data.

"The implementation process was really straightforward and smooth," said Sapseid.

"I had a conference call with one of Redstor's technicians and after a test to make sure everything was working; we were able to roll out the service overnight."

Backing up to cloud with Redstor took "a matter of a few hours" instead of the two days it used to take, Sapseid said.

After the fire critical data was restored in just two hours via a "high-speed broadband connection". Less critical data was back within 10 hours.

"Using online backup was clearly a huge benefit in this particular incident," remarked Sapseid.

"If we had still been using the tape-based backups 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."

The Academy's experience is a stark example of the advantages of cloud backup, especially for an SMB with limited budget and the need for quick, agile recovery.