Guidelines for Electronic Data Backup

These guidelines define the backup roles and responsibilities of Faculty Computing (FC) and Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (FAHSS) staff. They provide general information regarding electronic data backup and practices for Standard Operating Environment (SOE) users and details the benefits and problems of a centralised data backup system.

Roles and Responsibilities of FC and FAHSS staff

Ultimate responsibility for data backup lies with individual staff members. FC is available to offer advice to staff regarding backup practices.

The centralised backup system that operates for SOE users is in place to offer a reasonable level of data protection, but staff must decide if that is sufficient or if they wish to continue to perform their own individual backups. If staff choose to rely upon the FC backups (noting the benefits and problems outlined below), then they do so knowing it is not totally reliable and that any data loss is not the responsibility of FC.

Background Information – Overview of Data Types

Electronic data can be divided into three main types:

private data (personal documents that are relevant to only one staff member)
role-specific data (documents that are relevant to a particular role/position in the organisation)
area-specific data (documents that are relevant to an area/section)

The Faculty’s concern is with staff keeping adequate backups of role and area specific data rather than catering for backups of private data. Staff should carefully consider the quantity and types of data they are storing and how it is backed up.

Background Information – Overview of Backup Approaches

There are two main approaches to backing-up data:

long-term/archiving: many types of magnetic media, e.g. floppy or zip disks, are not recommended for long-term archival purposes – long-term storage is dependent on many factors and specific advice should be sought from FC regarding methods and options. Some issues to consider are:

how far into the future do you want the data to be available for – re-look at the CDrom on a regular basis (every two years), and every five years copy the data to new disks to cater for aging of the CD media – also look at the file formats again
what format to use for storage purposes – normally FC would suggest holding three formats of the same documents (in the latest version of MS Word, RTF and PDF) and store source files (e.g. jpeg, etc) separately
store a .txt doc on the disk outlining what the documents were written in originally and the application for reading them
variety of backup media formats (i.e. for the CDrom format, ISO 9600 is better than Mac or PC)
burn more than one copy of the CDrom and store in different places

short-term: this is appropriate for the backup of current working files, and should be carried out regularly by staff. Some issues to consider are:

regularity and complexity of taking a backup
holding off site backups
aging of backup media
holding generations of backup sets to protect against data corruption
what files actually need to be backed up

Data Backup Practices in FAHSS for SOE Users

All staff, including those on the SOE, are responsible for ensuring the adequacy of their own data backup.

There are two categories of SOE users: those who hold data locally and those who hold all their data on networked servers. The former store much of their data locally, a practice that is typical for laptop users, these users will not see their files if they log onto a different computer. The latter store their documents on the network, i.e. after logging on, their files can be accessed through any OSX computer.

Faculty Computing attempts to perform a nightly incremental backup for networked servers. The purpose of this backup is to maintain and facilitate the operation of the server system. As a consequence, FC may have a backup copy of networked user data, but the recovery and reliability of this data and the backup process can not be guaranteed. Backup sets on the servers are rotated every three months, and data is held in total for nine months. All staff should consider their backup requirements and if these current practices is sufficient for their needs.

Benefits and Problems of Centralised Data Backup

Benefits of centralised data backup under the SOE:

reduces the possibility of data loss
time to recover from data loss is lessened to two or three working days
provides corporate surety that data is available and accessible if a staff member leaves organisation
relieves some demands on support staff

Problems of centralised data backup under the SOE:

backing-up large files (i.e. disk images or movie files) uses a considerable amount of server space which has very real time and cost implications
data that has been encrypted, compressed or condensed can be difficult to retrieve
data set size per user is growing which increases the demands on server space and time to complete the full backup
cost of centralised data backup (equipment and service) is substantial and must be borne by FAHSS
perceived security/privacy issues – access to the backup servers is highly restricted but some access is necessary in order to operate the system, and compromised server security is possible

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CRICOS Provider Code: 00126G
Last updated 30 Oct 2009 14:04
Location: http://www.fc.arts.uwa.edu.au/page/48929
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