These pages provide information on backing up your data and examples of good practice, including: 

• Backup Checklist
• Backup Guides
• Glossary
• What should I back up?

• Users inadvertently delete files or overwrite existing files.
• External threats or disgruntled learners or educators may delete or overwrite files intentionally.
• Disk drives fail and lose all of the data they hold.
• Files become corrupted by bad disk sectors, magnetic fields and improper system shutdown.
• Disasters, such as flooding or fire, can affect buildings and the systems they contain and, although uncommon, must be planned for.
• Beyond the traditional threats, new threats to today’s systems include viruses and worms.

The internal Tape drives in Fileservers and Workstations require regular cleaning so that they continue to work efficiently.  It is recommended that the DAT Streamer should be cleaned at least once a week for optimum performance.

In an emergency when your normal backup fails or when you require an additional backup in the event of an upgrade, you can use Windows Explorer to make a copy of the required directories to your workstation hard drive

BECTA advises:

• Institutions shall have a backup strategy that includes details of what is backed up, the frequency of backup, storage of backup media (on and off site), recovery procedures, and the person responsible for backing up data.
• The person responsible for back up shall be appropriately trained.
• Institutions should educate individual users on how to backup their own personal data that is not backed up centrally by the system.
• Users should only save work to local devices when that device is regularly synchronised or backed up via removable media.
• System backup operations should be performed on a daily basis and should be transparent to users.
• Tests should be performed at regular intervals to verify that data can be recovered from the system backup media.
• Institutions should perform daily backups of new or changed data complemented by a full weekly backup of:
  • all institution administrative data
  • all users' personal data stored in the network user folders
  • all data stored in shared areas
  • all changeable educational data stored on the network
  • the mail server, or as a minimum, individual mailboxes
  • operating system/system state data
  • all activity and audit log files.
• Media containing daily backups should be stored in fireproof safes wherever possible and full backups should be removed off site to a secure location for safekeeping.
• A copy of all backup documentation should be kept off site.