Electronic Data Archiving and Restoration
Mott Community College highly values the electronic data created by our Faculty, Staff
and Students, and as such protects this data by creating backups. Backups are copies
of the electronic data, that are kept for the purpose of restoring the original data
in case of accidental deletion, hardware failure, corruption or disaster recovery.
These backups are stored on devices/tapes referred to as the Storage Medium. The purpose
of this document is to define the length of time the Storage Medium and the backups
contained within are stored before being over written (reused) or destroyed. Depending
on the type of data, the length of time to retain the backups will vary, the table
below details Mott Community College's electronic data retention policy for varying
data types:
| Email (Faculty/Staff only) |
90 days |
| Datatel (DW/Application Servers/Databases) |
1 year |
| File Shares/All other Data |
6 months |
Storage Medium
The college employs two medium types for backups, tape and disk. Disk based backups
will be created and stored outside of Mott's primary data center at Mott's business
continuity location*. Tape based backups will also be created at the continuity location,
but will be stored in a third secure location.
Email Backups
(Faculty/Staff only)
Mott Community College has contracted a third party for email backups. While the
individual medium types are not similar, any company that provides this service to
Mott will meet or exceed our internal security and storage polices. They will also
retain data in conjunction with the table above.
* When the business continuity site is fully established, until then an alternate
location will be used.
Example Scenarios:
Windows File Share Examples:
Steve from accounting works on a monthly revenue work sheet. He creates this file
on 1st of every month and plans on keeping the document on file indefinitely.
- Steve accidentally deletes June's file on July 15th, 2013. He notices the deletion
on Aug 1st, 2013. He calls the ITS help desk, and within 48 business hours the file
is restored. The request to restore the file occurred during the life span of the
backup.
- Steve accidentally deletes June's file on July 15th, 2013. He notices the deletion
on Feb 6th, 2014. He calls the ITS help desk and within 48 hours Steve receives a
call from the help desk. The help desk lets Steve know that ITS restored the files
from as long ago as possible (Aug 6, 2013) since the file did not exist on that restore,
it was determined the deletion occurred before the Aug 6, 2013 and that the file is
no longer available to restore. Since more than 6 months had passed from when the file was deleted, ITS was not able
to restore the file.
Email Examples:
Nancy from Humanities is working with a different community college. Nancy receives
weekly information on class loads to compare to corresponding classes at Mott.
- Nancy receives the email for the week of Jan 20th, 2015. She accidentally deletes
the email on Jan 28th, 2015. In Feb 2015 she sits down to do some analysis, she realizes
that the email is missing. She contacts the help desk who within 48 business hours
able to provide her a copy of the email that is missing. The request to restore the
file occurred during the life span of the backup. The life span begins when an email
is received or sent, and lasts 90 days.
- Nancy sits down to work on her analysis in July of 2015, while working on the data
from January she accidentally moves the email to the trash. She then opens the trash,
and instead of restoring the email, she accidentally pushes the "delete from trash
now" button. Nancy calls the ITS help desk to ask them to restore the email. ITS
is unable to restore the email for Nancy, as the backup is not available. Email is
backed up when emails are sent and received. Once 90 days have passed those backups
are purged, even if the email is still in your current email.
Datatel Example:
Steven from registration inserts new students accounts into the Datatel system. These
student accounts contain all the grades and financial data related for that student.
- On March 23rd 2020, tragedy strikes the Mott campus as the building containing the
Datatel computer system experiences a devastating fire. The data center is a complete
loss. ITS spends the next four weeks restoring key systems, using back ups stored
in fire resistant safes located in a different location, ITS is able to restore most
key systems to March 20th's, 2020. More recent tapes were burned in the fire. Steven
will need to re-enter the student information into Datatel for March 21 forward.
- On April 25, 2026 Steven is requested by management to show exactly how the 2026/2
schedule for a particular student looked in Datatel on April 5, 2025. Steven calls
the ITS Help Desk and is informed the oldest Datatel backup available for recovery
is from April 26, 2025. Of course Steven can also request recovery of the Datatel
database to see how the 2026/2 student schedule looked on any particular day thereafter
as well as to see how it currently looks in the online live Datatel database.
