Students at London's City University are anxious to discover whether backup tapes containing their work have been damaged after a fire raged through the computing department last week. A spokeswoman for the university said that backup tapes had been stored in a fireproof safe in the same building as the server room. Neil Barrett, security consultant at risk management firm IRM, said one of the question marks over fire-proof safes is whether they are suitable for protecting magnetic tapes.
Magnetic tape perishes at a lower temperature.
The guidelines for protecting data against disaster are obvious - at least you'd like to think so. You should always be inclined to think of offsite storage. The spokeswoman confirmed the department's server room, SAP lab and email server were completely destroyed. We're rebuilding the subnets - some are already rebuilt. More than 900 staff and students were without email and web access for almost three days.