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Secure cost effective data backup for schools
 Fact: one in four schools suffer data loss on a regular basis – many people think that for data loss to affect a school it has to be major. This is an obvious assumption but also the loss of a single e-mail or pupils work in some circumstances can be embarrassing for the school and distressing for the pupil.
You should be asking yourself, How vital is the data held on our computer system to the continued operation of the school, and its reputation?
You can simply say yes it is vital, but the steps you take to protect the data is the real answer. We find it troubling when schools lose large quantities of data and then get very upset, talking about how important that data was! If it’s so important, why isn’t it backed up properly in the first place? It is not necessarily a major disaster that causes the loss of important data.
Apart from hardware failure, fire, flood etc there is also a risk from virus attacks, accidental deletion and even disgruntled staff have been known to delete important information prior to them leaving.
Also if your equipment was severely damaged or stolen, what good is any form of tape/disk without a drive to put it in?
Imagine losing your accounts data or SIMS information and then having to rely on staff to re key in the missing information or asking pupils to have to recreate their school work…unthinkable.
Reliability of modern computer systems and IT staff time are the main reason given for schools not taking a great deal of care in their data backup procedures, but many do not realise the implications should a major data loss occur. The pain of recovering from a disaster is almost always very high, and the cost is primarily in the time required to recreate the lost data. For even a small school, this can run into thousands of pounds very quickly.
Recovering from data loss can be a very traumatic event, much more than most computer users realise. This is true even if backups exist so when they don’t exist the situation is much, much worse.
There are many benefits to be gained from using a secure, well established company like Safe Data Storage. We take away the uncertainty and worry by providing a daily, managed off site data backup service. If IT matters enough to get upset over losing, it’s worth protecting.
Some schools do at least try to perform some kind of data backup but unless it is done daily and follows strict procedures it is as bad as having no data backups at all.
What should happen
An elected a member of staff (normally an IT manager’s junior assistant) is given the responsibility of changing some form of magnetic media in the server on a daily basis. The person responsible is meant to read through the backup report from the previous event, then take action if a problem is found. The media should then be removed, labelled and stored safely somewhere (preferably away from the building housing the system) in a fire proof safe.
What actually happens
Very often the designated member of staff is too busy to change the tape daily due to time constraints. In some cases, due to limited IT knowledge they rarely, if at all, check the backup log files to ensure the backup has been successful and is complete. Many admit once the tape has been removed from the server, it is left on a shelf or simply “slung” in the draw in their desk to be dealt with later. During periods of school holidays and sickness the backup is often not performed. Not a secure or reliable procedure at all really.
How does it work?
Your system is set to select and send data to our remote servers, normally during the night. This data is fully encrypted and password protected prior to leaving your system so no one, unless authorised, can access it. It is stored remotely on our servers in highly secure data centres. The next business day we check your backup report to ensure it has been performed successfully and completely. Should we see from the report that something is amiss, we will inform you within hours and either run another backup or advise you to investigate any files/folders etc that are missing or shown to be corrupt.
Data encryption and password protection is used to ensure your data is unreadable at all times.
What does it cost?
Dependant upon data size but on average a primary school pays around £350.00 + vat per annum whilst a secondary school is paying just £975.00 + vat per annum. A small price to pay for guaranteed daily backup. Provided that you have Internet access, we can do the rest.
For more information
For a no obligation quotation or to discuss the service in more detail, please do not hesitate to
contact us on 0844 4068094 or e-mail
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. Alternatively, visit www.safedatastorage.co.uk
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