Schools not backing up data

Schools need to do more to backup data, as a new survey reveals 70 per cent do not have a good policy to protect information held on teachers' laptops.

As more and more teachers use laptops - their own or school-supplied - to create lesson plans, data loss is becoming an increasingly large threat, according to a survey of UK schools by elearning provider Equiinet. Some 20 per cent of schools said they'd lost all the data on a server or laptop before.

"Admittedly in the past it was difficult to back up teachers' laptops," said Equiinet Product Marketing Director, David Abbot. "ICT staff would have to rely on teachers remembering to copy their important data manually to central servers. But now there can be no excuses: fully automated backup systems are available that cater for PCs and laptops as well as servers."

Most schools, some 85 per cent, do backup their server information, but only 60 per cent said student coursework is consistently backed up. "Conversations we have had with students confirm that coursework does get lost, and they know they are best advised to make their own copies," said Abbot.

A wise lessons for students, as the survey also found that even when information is backed up, just 30 per cent were able to actually recover lost data.