Flood-hit school recovers data

Flood-hit areas face a data recovery nightmare from damaged computer equipment, but all is not necessarily lost, as one school has found.

St James' Primary School in Hull was flooded last month, submerging the six hard drives it has arranged as a redundant array of independent drives (RAID). The motherboard and three of the drives were damaged, and the school thought it had lost important student and teacher-related information.

To try to recover the data, the school contacted Hull City Council's Learning Services IT (LSIT), which provides services to local schools. "We were unable to recover the data, and thought that the probability of it being recovered was negligible," said Paul Stevens, LSIT's manager.

The LSIT and the school made one more attempt to recover the data by contacting a specialist firm called Data Clinic. "We had a look at it," said the firm's spokeswoman Sejal Khilosia. "They wanted to have a diagnosis, and we said it looked like we could help."

Despite the level of damage, they were able to completely recover the information - but not without some difficulty. It took a day and a half of work, according to Khilosia. The hard disks were dismounted, treated and chemically dried in a sealed environment before being relubricated, mounted and recalibrated.

"We were extremely impressed with the recovery of the data on the RAID," said Stevens. "The team managed to completely restore all of the data...resulting in full operations at the site within days."

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