Back up & Recovery Policy

PURPOSE:

All electronic information considered of institutional value should be copied onto secure storage media on a regular basis (i.e. backed up), for disaster recovery and to facilitate business continuity. The purpose of this policy is to outline the minimum requirements regarding backing up and recovering information of institutional value for HU.

SCOPE:

This policy includes all staff and faculty of HU; this policy only addresses backup and recovery of electronic data. Paper records are beyond the scope of this policy.

DEFINITIONS:

Critical institutional data is defined as specific data necessary for the conduct of HU’s business. Off-site location is defined as a location where backup media can be stored that is not in the same building as the computer servers and other systems being backed up reside.

POLICY:

1. The ITS Department is responsible for developing a backup and recovery plan to facilitate the proper protection of institutional data. The plan should include, but is not  limited to the following:
1. Identification of all critical data, applications, documentation, personnel, facilities, and other support items that would be necessary to perform essential tasks during a recovery period.
2. The specific backup and recovery processes designed to restore the organization’s critical data.
3. The backup scheme used (timeframe for full, or incremental backups).
4. Location for off-site storage of critical data. Organizations will document the procedures for maintaining a current copy of the critical data and will determine the frequency of update to this off-site storage.
5. Documentation of the restoration process including the procedures for the recovery from single-system or application failures as well as for a total disaster scenario.
2. Backup and recovery plans must be reviewed and updated regularly to account for new technology, business changes, and migration of applications to alternative platforms.
3. All critical information shall be placed on a networked file server for backup.
4. Recovery procedures will be tested on a periodic basis. At a minimum these procedures will be tested on an annual basis.

PROCEDURE:

Critical institutional data on desktop Personal Computers: Faculty and staff are requested to store critical institutional data on their “My Documents” folder. In order to ensure backup and recovery of such data, every user’s “My Documents” folder is re-directed to a private folder on a secure server. This private folder is automatically backed up nightly to tape drives, which are stored in a safe off-site location.

Critical institutional data on servers: In order to ensure backup and recovery of this data, every HU software application must perform nightly backups. This includes three types of application software: a) academic applications, such as, the Student Information System, Blackboard, and other such applications software, b) administrative applications, such as, the General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Payroll and other such applications software, and 3)infrastructure applications, such as: Active Directory, Mail servers, DHCP/DNS, and other such systems software. For a list of all HU applications and infrastructure software, see the full list of HU software.

Backup Tape rotation method: HU uses 10 LT02, 200/400 GB tapes, rotated on a weekly basis as follows: full daily backups are taken every Monday through Thursday, and these tapes are re-used on a weekly basis. Backups taken on Fridays (which normally constitute data for an entire week) are kept for one month, and are reused after that. HU doesn’t normally operate on weekends and holidays, and therefore no backups are taken on these dates.

Restore procedures: In the event there’s a need to restore individual or server institutional data, a careful analysis is undertaken to determine which specific day’s or period’s tapes to use for the recovery. This is coordinated with the user and the ITS analysts.

Disaster recovery procedures: HU currently doesn’t have any formal procedures in this area and will be developing them soon.