The purpose of this policy is to outline the requirements for performing regular backups of Northwestern’s systems, applications, and data to ensure they are adequately preserved and protected in the event of accidental deletion, data corruption, system failure, or disaster.

Backing-up digital communications, data, and other electronic files is an essential Information Technology (IT) practice to ensure against the loss of valuable information. The purpose of backups is to restore a system to a current state (as of the date of the most recent backup) in case of system failure, or to restore individual files inadvertently deleted or lost. Backup media is not intended to serve as short or long-term storage of information. 

This policy applies to all systems, applications and data managed and maintained by IT at Northwestern.  This policy does not include laptops, desktop computers, personal devices, or mobile devices. 

Backup Frequency 

• A backup of all production servers and data is created daily and stored on-site in a separate disk storage system 

• On-site backups for production servers and data are replicated daily to a separate off-site disk storage system 

Backup Retention 

• On-site backups will be retained for 30 days and then purged  

• Off-site backups will be retained for 7 days and then purged 

• AWS backups are immutable

Cloud Hosted Data 

• Deleted items in Office 365 (Email, SharePoint, OneDrive) are retained for 30 days after the initial deletion. 

• IT verifies that all cloud vendors retain backups for a minimum of 30 days. 

Verification 

• Automated system backup restores occur weekly. 

• Manual off-site backup restores occur annually (including full Banner and Payroll verification).

Backup Restoration 

• Only Systems Administrators can restore data for a user from IT backup systems

• Local storage of files on individual computers must be synced or backed up to Office 365 to be restored from these locations. Files stored only on a local hard drive will be lost if the computer is misplaced or damaged.