Gas explosion in AT basement (not for real!)
Every now and then, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise.
On the 13th January, the computing staff were told that over the preceding weekend, as a result of a gas explosion in the basement of Appleton Tower, all of our IT equipment in the AT basement had been destroyed.
Each computing unit was asked to produce a report on what services would have been affected and the state of the backups for those services. They were also asked to test reinstall one service just from those backups. The reports are available here.
In summary, the only data lost was scratch data on a small number of servers. A config file for the plone service was lost, but could have been easily restored from a number of external web sites.
