Disaster Recovery Questions

I am the IT Technician at a school in Merseyside. I am also doing a degree in IT part-time (oh joy!).

I’ve got a few questions on how schools across the UK meet their Disaster Recovery requirements.

If you work as a Network Manager/Technician at a school/college I’d be eternally grateful if you could answer the following questions on Disaster Recovery!

Basic Information

1. What type of establishment is it? (Primary School / High School / College)

2. How many users do you have on all networks?

3. What region is your school situated? (North-West / South-West / North East / South East)

Disaster Recovery (DR) Plans

4. Does the establishment have a DR Plan? (Yes/No)

5. Do you review your DR plans regularly? (never/once/occasionally/often)

6. Do you test your DR plans regularly? (never/once/occasionally/often)

7. How many times have you had to implement your DR plans? (never/once/occasionally/often)


Disaster Recovery Technologies

8. What technologies do you use to protect your data? (Single Tape Drive/Tape Library/Off-site Backups/Disk Backups/Other)

9. How do you protect your most recent backup? (Take Off-site/We Don’t!/Collections/Fire-Proof Safe/Other)

10. How often do you do a full back up your data? (Weekly/Daily/Monthly/Longer)


Thank You!!

1. High School
2. 1500
3. North West
4. Yes
5. Once
6. Once
7. Never
8. Single Tape Drive/Tape Library
9. Take Off-site
10. Daily/Weekly

1. Seconday
2. ~1050
3. East Anglia
4. Yes
5. Occasionally
6. Occasionally
7. never
8. Disk to Disk to tape backups with a remote backup server and offsite tapes, plus snapshots.
9. Other - physically remote backup server
10. Weekly

1. Secondary
2. 990
3. East-Anglia
4. Yes
5. Occasionally
6. Occasionally
7. Never
8. Off-site and On-site disk backups
9. Remote building On-site
10. Termly

1. Secondary
2. 1550
3. North East
4. Yes
5. Occasionally
6. Once
7. Never **Touches Wood**
8. Disk > Disk > Tape (Which is hosted in an alternative building to the server room)
9. Off Site
10. Weekly

1. Secondary School
2. about 500
3. South East
4. Not officially, but I do in my head
5. Once when I setup the new system
6. Ocassionally
7. Once - lost an entire server when the RAID array failed, tape restore worked like a charm.
8. Sony AIT3 tape changer which is struggling to cope now.
9. Fire proof safe on site
10. Weekly with differential backups Mon-Thurs

Thanks for your responses so far guys! they will help loads :)

I just need a few more to get an accurate picture if anyone has 5 minutes!

Hi mate, I'm an ICT Technician at a mid-large Comprehensive.

1 - Comprehensive School
2 - ~1600
3 - South West (Wales)

4 - Not officially, no. I suspect me and the NM would be passing forth panicked strategies while looking over the charred remains of a server :D
5 - never
6 - Test the backups for integrity, but we haven't tried a full server restore (no time)
7 - never

8 - Tape Library and "Terastation" backups
9 - Kept on site, but in a different building to the main servers/disk-disk-tape backups
10 - weekly via disk-disk-tape, twice per term via "Terastation" portable HDD (stored in safe in different building) along with passwords incase me and the NM die (sometimes we share lifts)
Differential backups are made daily (I also have Volume Shadow Copy enabled)