Backups

Requirement Statement

All data critical to the operation of the College will be backed up on a nightly schedule using standard mechanisms provides as part of the IU Intelligent Infrastructure. Backup data must be co-located to facilitate Disaster Recovery (DR) processes. Backups will be retained a minimum of 14 days. Backup reports will be reviewed daily and representative test restores will be performed monthly, once for each backup method in use.

Data deemed not critical to the operation of the school will be backed up at the discretion of the respective data owners. College IT staff will communicate with the data owners to assess backup needs and procedures. Such backups will employ various methods including, but not limited to, SDA and locally developed procedures. Such backups may or may not be co-located and retention windows will vary, based on the particular needs of the data owner.

Backup reports will be provided for all servers and made available to appropriate stakeholders within the school (as defined by the backup contact in the hardware database). These reports will detail 1) the data being backed up, 2) the backup frequency, 3) the retention window, and 4) the backup method employed. The reports will be reviewed and approved by the appropriate stakeholders annually. Approval of central school server backups will be the responsibility of the College Leader for College IT Research, Infrastructure, and Support.

Exceptions to Requirement

• Workstations - Individual workstations will not be backed up unless special arrangements are made by the user. Users, with data critical to the operation of the College, must use central file servers and automatic share mapping will be employed to transparently map common storage areas (eg. My Documents/Desktop on Windows and $HOME on Linux) to file server space that is backed up.
• Mobile Devices - Mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones will not be backed up. Individual users should leverage institutional storage for IU institutional data (currently Microsoft Secure Storage aka TEAMS or Google Shared Drive.*
• Hosted/Cloud Services - The College IT group will not be responsible for backups of hosted services such as Box, Qualtrics, ShareLaTeX, and Symplicity.
• Research Data - Backups of data hosted on dedicated research servers that is not critical to the operation of the College and not part of the central College fileserver infrastructure will be backed up at the discretion of the server owner. College IT staff will work with server owners to define appropriate backup frequency and retention windows. Costs may be incurred depending on the exact backup requirements and server owners can opt out of backups entirely, at their discretion.