Equiinet, a Sunday Times Tech Track Top 100 company and a leading provider of caching and network security appliances, has launched a magazine called ‘Data Backup for Education’. They received nearly 500 responses to an online questionnaire about schools data back up procedures. Some interesting numbers emerged: the average primary school size was 233 pupils with 33 PCs, 11 teachers’ laptops and at least one server. To manage this, only one in three had a full-time ICT specialist; the rest relied on part-time support. The average secondary school size was 990 pupils with 302 PCs, 68 teachers’ laptops and 5 or more servers with 3 full-time and 1 part-time ICT specialist to manage them.

Whilst most schools in the survey back up daily onto tape, over half leave the back up media in the same building as the equipment or server. 20% of schools had lost all the data on a server or laptop.

At the time of writing, it’s too early to know the fallout from the recent floods in Gloucestershire, etc. but only nine of Hull City Council’s 99 school sites were not affected by the recent flooding in Yorkshire.

www.equiinet.com