Redstor saves student data from school fire

The IT manager of a West Sussex school has told how implementing Redstor's data backup and recovery software ensured it was able to retrieve the data lost in a devastating fire.

The Academy Selsey deployed Redstor's Backup Service for Schools software in 2016, when it decided the legacy system of backing up confidential and crucial student data on tapes needed to be replaced.

“I would often leave the backup process to complete over the weekend and then would take the tapes home with me," the school’s IT manager, Daniel Sapseid, said. "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."

Immediately following the fire in August this year, the headteacher contacted Sapseid to check whether the data was able to be restored. Within two hours, the information had been retrieved from Redstor's cloud service and systems were back up and running.

“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,” Sapseid said.

“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.”

Sapseid said the software not only ensured important information was saved when it was needed most, but he also explained how the whole process deploying Redstor went without a hitch too.

“The implementation process was really straightforward and smooth,” he said. “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.”