Patent ID: 8879095

Claim:
An image forming system, comprising: a management apparatus; and a transmitter; and a plurality of image forming apparatuses, wherein the management apparatus includes: a first storage unit that stores authentication information including identification information and storage information with the identification information mapped to the storage information, the identification information identifying a user, the storage information indicating a storage location of each of the image forming apparatuses where image data corresponding to the identification information is stored, the storage information being preset for each user; an extract unit that extracts from the stored authentication information in the first storage unit, the storage information corresponding to the identification information sent from each of the image forming apparatuses; and a transmit unit that transmits to each of the image forming apparatuses the extracted storage information; wherein each of the image forming apparatuses includes: an image data storage unit that stores an image data; an authentication request unit that requests to the management apparatus to authenticate the user by transmitting the identification information to the management apparatus; a receive unit that receives the storage information from the management apparatus; an identifying unit that identifies the storage location of another one of the image forming apparatuses storing the image data corresponding to the identification information; a retrieval unit that retrieves, from the storage location of the another one of the image forming apparatuses identified by the identifying unit, the image data corresponding to the identification information; and an image forming unit that forms an image responsive to the image data retrieved by the retrieval unit, wherein the transmitter transmits the image data corresponding to the identification information to the storage locations in the image forming apparatuses, wherein the first storage unit stores the storage information indicating the plurality of storage locations; wherein the identifying unit identifies the plurality of storage locations indicated by the storage information stored and mapped to the input identification information; and wherein the retrieval unit retrieves the image data corresponding to the identification information from the storage location that stores the image data corresponding to the identification information, from among the plurality of storage locations identified by the identifying unit, wherein the plurality of storage locations have different priority levels which are set in the transmitter, and when the retrieval unit cannot retrieve the image data from the one of the storage locations having a highest one of the priority levels, the retrieval unit retrieves the image data from one of the storage locations having a second highest one of the priority levels.