NSW-based local government, Leichhardt Council plans to implement backup and restore software for its offsite disaster recovery process.

The council plans to extend its use of disk-based backup and restore software, ShadowProtect from StorageCraft, which has been used for four years.

IT manager, Hanna Wilcock said the IT team looks at other solutions, but found that ShadowProtect was “really cost effective and simple to implement and use”.

According to Wilcock, the IT team’s confidence in ShadowProtect led to the current plan to use the software for offsite data recovery,

Ms Wilcock said the council uses tape for storage, but ShadowProtect for backup, which takes two snapshots each day of each of the organisation’s main servers.

The IT team is called on “practically every day” to restore lost files, which are typically recovered within minutes, Ms Wilcock said.

She said Leichardt had experienced one major disaster, which was losing a partition on the document management server, which holds the council’s entire document management database, which was “critical” because all areas of the council used this system.

“We were upgrading our document management system over the weekend, after taking a ShadowProtect snapshot when the working week finished,” Ms Wilcock said.

“We didn’t realize there was a problem, but on Saturday morning, even through we had a RAID configuration, the partition crashed because two hard disks had failed.”

The actual data recovery using the software only took two hours, Ms Wilcock said.

“We were able to restore the hard disks and rebuild the database with absolutely no data loss,” she said.

She said the council also uses StorageCraft ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange for backing up and restoring e-mail servers.

It has not been used to restore a mail server in an emergency situation but the IT team has restored individual mailboxes, Ms Wilcock said.