File deletion/archiving policy each year

[zag]

As a school policy, do people archive or delete files at the end of every year?

Our backup is something ridiculous like 110gb now and I am thinking about simply moving all the students work each year to an offline disk.

Do people think this is this acceptable?

[danIT]

At the end of each year we take all the users (leavers) home folders and move them to an old server which is simply attached to the network. Z:/archieve/0607

After 1 year they are deleted inline with the school policy.

[zag]

Are there any good utilities to do this?

Seems like a massive job to do each home folder manually.

[kerrymoralee9280]

He doesn't do each home folder. He only does the leavers (Year 11). You archive the leavers folders for 1 year and then delete, after which the new leavers take their spot in the archive.

It's not a good idea to archive/delete work each year. 110 Gb might seem like a big backup, but we had ours up to 400Gb. Just got to get bigger tapes I'm affraid - At least that's the best policy in my opinion.

[Linfit]

We keep our Year 11 folders on the main file server until after the deadline for coursework appeals has passed (usually end of October). Then we copy them off to whichever server we happen to have some spare space on, and after about a year will delete them.

[daveyboy]

Here's what we do in the summer hols: -

Years 7, 8, and 9 - move all the home folders to a spare hard drive & copy to a portable drive.

Recreate home folders.

Years 10, 11 & Sixth copy to said Spare hard drive & Portable drive, (Spare hard drive goes off site) This is so we have a (extra) complete backup each year off site.

Then delete from our servers all the leavers.

Student shared gets deleted every night, Staff shared - drives me up the bl**dy wall, I think I'll move it off the servers this year and put back only what is requested - Yep, I'll have to put up with moans!

[maniac]

As a school policy, do people archive or delete files at the end of every year?

Our backup is something ridiculous like 110gb now and I am thinking about simply moving all the students work each year to an offline disk.

Do people think this is this acceptable?

Our backup is almost on 500gb now!!!

We archive all staff leavers and student leavers at the end of every year onto a backup tape which is verified and stored in the backup safe. We then remove this data off the servers.

We regularly go through and tidy up areas like our Technicians shared area which fills up with rubbish, and scan for things like MP3 files on the network which we delete.

It does take a bit of time to do this maintenance, but if it's done regularly then it's not so bad.

Mike.