Backup Policy for Schools

[Berttielp]

Hi All,

 

We are currently reviewing our backup requirements and in particular data retention.

 

We are a UK secondary school.

 

how long are you all keeping your data for before the backups are overwritten.

 

how long to you keep student data after they have left the school.

 

Is any of your data retained off-site in the true sense of the word. Ie a remote site well away from school property.

 

Regards

 

Rob

[synaesthesia]

Backups are kept only as long as needed and those will differ per school but obviously bearing in mind what is being backed up; user data for instance needs to be gone in nearly all cases until the student is 25, or 6 years after staff member has left.

And off-site - ours are kept truly off site but still on school property - split site makes this possible for us and many MAT's do similar to datacentres etc.

[Katy]

Hi All,

 

We are currently reviewing our backup requirements and in particular data retention.

 

We are a UK secondary school.

 

how long are you all keeping your data for before the backups are overwritten.

 

how long to you keep student data after they have left the school.

 

Is any of your data retained off-site in the true sense of the word. Ie a remote site well away from school property.

 

Regards

 

Rob

We probably need to review this too so will be interesting to watch this thread.

 

We cycle our tapes in 6 sets - weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, (1, 2, 3,) 8, (1, 2, 3,) 12.

 

Nothing is stored off-site - server room is roughly in the middle of a 34 acre plot where we store on disk, another copy on disk is the far edge of the plot in one direction, and the set on tape is the edge of the plot in the opposite direction.

[Berttielp]

So here is an example...

 

Our longest backup retention is 6 weeks currently (according to documentation should be 8).

 

Student A could delete a piece of work just before the summer holidays start, come back to school and 1 week in or so find that some of her data is missing and we find there is no backup of the work ..

 

Any thoughts ?

 

Regards

 

Rob

[enjay]

We keep daily backups of file and DC servers for 3 months; app and print servers which don't change much are kept for a week. Month-end backups are kept for 12 months. All backups are held in a remote datacentre, which is also backed up to a second remote-remote datacentre.

 

We also have shadow copy enabled so users can restore files themselves (or more commonly, we can restore files for them but without having to go back to our desks to access the backups)

[Berttielp]

Hi Enjay.

 

for the remote backups ...are you able to tell what service / products you use ?

 

Regards

 

ROb

[enjay]

for the remote backups ...are you able to tell what service / products you use ?

 

We have a hybrid cloud network, so most of our servers are hosted in a datacentre. The datacentre providers handle the backups of the data centre presence and our onsite servers. IIRC, they're using Unitrends.