SIMS to Arbor (via Groupcall Xporter) and 6 years of historic student, staff and guardian data

[SlightlyWonky]

Hello all,

We will be migrating to Arbor shortly. Just wanted to get some advise from those who've already gone through the migration process and what they did to preserve data beyond 6 years (Guidance on data retention for schools in England for SIMS GroupCall Migrations – Arbor Help Centre).

Have any of you opted for the .BAK migration (How to migrate from SIMS using a backup file – Arbor Help Centre ) which migrates data beyond 6 years limit as opposed to Groupcall Migration.

@AlistairB1983 I noticed you've responded on the post below, so thought I would tag you in, if you are able to share you thoughts.

Thank you all in advance.

 

[andy_b]

The BAK method can be problematic:

 

Quote

For the avoidance of doubt, providing any third party with copies of SIMS or FMS databases is expressly forbidden, so too is undertaking migrations using unlawful methods

 

There was the Arbor Switch guarantee (https://arbor-education.com/blog-arbor-switching-guarantee/), but I don't know if that is still in place.

 

So there is a legal risk.

[SlightlyWonky]

@andy_b Thanks for your post. I thought as much based on this article below. Any thoughts on how data can be preserved beyond the 6 years?
CMA closes investigation into ESS SIMS – WhichMIS? – Presenting a balanced view of the UK’s MIS landscape featuring news, reviews and expert commentary.
Excerpt: 
"Undoubtedly, schools and MIS competitors will have their own views on this one, but, for now, the matter has been closed and any MIS changes from SIMS to an alternative provider will need to use the SIMS APIs and SIMS Report Generator to extract the school data."

[Jobos]

On 10/07/2026 at 15:08, SlightlyWonky said:

Hello all,

We will be migrating to Arbor shortly. Just wanted to get some advise from those who've already gone through the migration process and what they did to preserve data beyond 6 years (Guidance on data retention for schools in England for SIMS GroupCall Migrations – Arbor Help Centre).

Have any of you opted for the .BAK migration (How to migrate from SIMS using a backup file – Arbor Help Centre ) which migrates data beyond 6 years limit as opposed to Groupcall Migration.

@AlistairB1983 I noticed you've responded on the post below, so thought I would tag you in, if you are able to share you thoughts.

Thank you all in advance.

 

We were all ready to move then the head changed his mind and wanted to stay with SIMS after all.

[psydii]

Has anyone tried negotiating a single-user perpetual licence to their legacy MIS product(s)?

[Devaleth]

On 10/07/2026 at 16:13, SlightlyWonky said:

@andy_b Thanks for your post. I thought as much based on this article below. Any thoughts on how data can be preserved beyond the 6 years?
CMA closes investigation into ESS SIMS – WhichMIS? – Presenting a balanced view of the UK’s MIS landscape featuring news, reviews and expert commentary.
Excerpt: 
"Undoubtedly, schools and MIS competitors will have their own views on this one, but, for now, the matter has been closed and any MIS changes from SIMS to an alternative provider will need to use the SIMS APIs and SIMS Report Generator to extract the school data."

 

In our move to Bromcom, we downloaded the PDO's for all students and staff, and did our best to replicate the document server - realistically this ended up being things like report cards more than other documents due to naming conventions. We've got a schedule to then delete these as they fall out of retention windows.

 

Not helpful if we were ever to need to interrogate historic data in bulk that hasn't already been looked at, but has been fine for singular data requests.