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What you should back up
There are 2 ways that a school can back up its data – online and offline. We recommend focusing on backing up your critical data first.
Critical data is data that is considered essential for the day-to-day operations of your school. This is likely to include:
- staff and ākonga | student information
- administrative data
- security information
- legal or compliance data.
See more information on deciding which data to back up.
Setting up backups
Online or cloud backups
Schools can use Google Drive for desktop or Microsoft OneDrive to back up their files to the cloud. This function is available at no extra cost as part of the Microsoft and Google Workplace licenses that we fund.
These services will back up your documents. They do not provide a full backup service of everything that is saved on your device.
Use the following link to learn more about setting up Google drive for desktop.
Use the following link to learn more about setting up Microsoft OneDrive.
Once you have successfully completed installing OneDrive or Google Drive for desktop, you can enable offline access to the files you frequently work with. The updates you make on your computer will get saved as soon as you reconnect to the internet.
After setting up cloud backups at your school, students and staff can choose to:
- work on documents directly in Google Drive for desktop or Microsoft OneDrive
- work on a document saved on your device, then manually uploading a copy to Google Drive for desktop or Microsoft OneDrive.
Offline or local backups
An offline backup means the data is stored digitally somewhere nearby (at your school or within your town) that’s not connected to the internet or your network. This includes backing up your data on external hard drives, USB sticks, or network attached storage (NAS) devices or backup servers.
When setting up offline backups, make sure you:
- define a process for taking offline backups, including who will take the backup and how often
- store the backups in a safe place where only authorised people have access
- encrypt the data to make it unreadable for unauthorised people
- test the backup from time to time to make sure you can restore the data if needed.
Backup approach
We recommend you have 2 copies of your critical data:
- A cloud copy (online backup).
- A local copy (offline backup).
If only 1 copy is feasible, we recommend prioritising creating online backups of your data.
For data stored on your student management system (SMS) or your website, we recommend discussing this with your service provider. You should understand what backup services they provide and whether you will be required to maintain your own backups.
How long to keep a backup
The length of time you keep a backup will be determined by the School Records – Retention and Disposal Schedule.
Frequency of backups
How often you back up your data depends on the importance of information and how often it changes. Data that is backed up more frequently requires less effort if it gets corrupted.
Things to consider include:
- How frequently the data is updated. For example, if an information technology (IT) system is updated fortnightly, backing up daily is unnecessary.
- How much data staff feel comfortable losing before it impacts their ability to do their job. For example, if staff only feel comfortable losing a day’s worth of data, then consider taking daily backups of the data.
Discuss with your staff before deciding on the frequency of taking backups.
If you are automatically backing up your data using Google Drive for desktop and Microsoft OneDrive, then you won’t need to define the frequency of backups for this specific data.
