1.0 Purpose

To provide College faculty and staff with an overview of backup services offered by the Research   Instruction & Information Technology (RIIT) Group. Backup services provide for recovery of files that may have been accidentally erased or for disaster recovery in the event of a system or disc failure.  Faculty, staff and graduate students are strongly encouraged to make use of the central file server for their data.  If not, faculty, staff and graduate students should adopt their own system backup policies and procedures.

2.0 Scope

The College’s primary servers, departmental and organizational servers managed by the RIIT Group are backed up nightly. Faculty and staff data files stored on servers are included in the nightly backups.

3.1  Policy

The Smeal College of Business’s backup services are limited to core College and departmental servers. These servers are backed up according to a cyclical schedule according to the following procedures:

• Faculty and staff are encouraged to store all research files, critical  proposals,  documentation,  or administrative  files  on their user or shared drives, which are located on the Smeal Data
• Access to servers is through a Smeal account that may be established by a member of the RIIT IT Support Group  (itsupport@smeal.psu.edu).
• Full server backups are completed once a
• Incremental backups are performed Monthly backups are retained for a minimum period of two (2) months; incremental backups are retained for a minimum of thirty (30) days. Files accidentally or purposely deleted longer than the retention period are permanently lost and not recoverable.

RIIT Group managed College Email and Virtual Server environments and backup operations thereof:

• Both the College email systems and the virtual servers operate in a dual redundant
• The services of both Email and Virtual network systems are under controlled access and are available only to authorized Access is through a Smeal College of Business account that may be established by a member of the RIIT IT Support Group (itsupport@smeal.psu.edu) or may be established through a Smeal College of Business Departmental Contact.

The backup philosophy relating to other non RIIT managed servers or services is as follows:

• Faculty and staff are strongly encouraged to develop a backup strategy for their non RIIT Group managed desktop and/or laptop
• Faculty and staff have the option of purchasing backup space from
• Faculty and staff have the option of procuring disk drive or tape backup systems that they or their departmental contacts may
• All backup solutions must meet University and College Disaster Recovery requirements and so must be physically isolated from the hosts they This is necessary to prevent data loss in the event of a catastrophe whereby an entire facility is lost.

Security requirements for data backup:

• Data backups must meet the same technical and physical security requirements as for the “at rest” storage on the hosts they For example, a backup solution that serves hosts containing Public, Internal/Controlled, and Restricted data must meet the same security requirements as the highest security client it serves (i.e., Restricted) as set forth in the University and College Data Classification Standards and Security Requirements policies.

4.0 Enforcement

RIIT Group personnel will ensure that all College critical servers and departmental server managed by RIIT Group are backed up according to this policy.

5.0 Revision History

9/27/13 – edited

06/04/2007 -­‐ Initial modification from COE policies, used with permission in conjunction with the Penn State IPAS project. http://www.ipas.psu.edu/

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