Backup Data Best Practices
It seems like there are quite a few different proposals here related to backups in different capacities. I'd be interested to hear from your support how often this is an issue. Based on our experience with supporting our faculty & student users, I'd guess rather a lot.
When attempting to resolve a recent issue, which admittedly was user error, I was told that the isn't a true backup but a test environment has data from the last 24 hours. After which it is over written.
Best practices for backups in the IT industry are generally 2 weeks. Even 1 week would be an improvement. With the many layers of complexity in this system, it's not unusual for someone to make a mistake but not realize the implications for over 24 hours. As we continue to move more and more of our systems to the cloud and the Blackbaud SIS/LMS/admission/bulk messaging options we need the confidence that comes with a regular system of data backups.
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Colleen McNeil
- Dec 5 2017
Related ideas
Almost 10 months since this post and I can tell you my confidence in Blackbaud's ability to protect our data has gone out the window. I've been an I.T. professional for over 20 years and I'm shocked about Blackbaud's backup process.
The majority of those 20 years has been spent at the school I'm currently working at and we've been using Blackbaud products almost that entire time. It was not until recently that we went to a system hosted by Blackbaud. Their databases that we hosted on site always had system that could be used to create a backup retention that would minimize data loss should error occur. When talking with their sales team we were told there was a nightly backup. I made the assumption that these backups would be retained. We all know what happens when we assume and what I've been turned into!
Below is my post in another suggestion.
It is unfortunate to see this thread not getting more support but I'm not surprised. Backups are not something most people think of until it is needed.
Considering all that is going on these days it is highly irresponsible of Blackbaud not to have a better backup and recovery system considering how easy it is for data in grade books to get deleted. If i had known that Blackbaud only had either a last 24 hours or 4 weeks ago backup it would have been a deal breaker and we would have gone with a different system.
Storage is cheap, loss of data isn't. After a new employee accidentally used error to move a student to a new section of a class all of their grades were lost and now those parents are threatening to pull the student. That is a $240,000 error over the course of 4 years that should be easily solved.
Considering the cost of this system there is no excuse to not have a better backup system. What does this say about a company we have entrusted to secure our most important data if they cannot even perform industry standard data backup procedures. What other standard practices are they not performing that is putting our data at risk?
At the least, as the originator of this idea stated, there should be a method of a Platform Manager or Data Manager to manually download a copy of the grade book or other information. At most, it should take a programmer an hour or two to write a query to pull the grade books and put it into a CSV file for download.