Monthly Archives: October 2017

Data Retention Policies

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What is a Backup Retention Policy?

A Backup Retention Policy governs the time that you keep backed up data, with it you would also consider the archive rules, format, method of storage, access policy and encryption. All of which must be documented for legal and privacy reasons under the DPA (including the new GDPR).

The most common retention policy used by most IT professionals is the Grandfather–Father–Son method for maintaining a period of tiered restore points. This method is a rotation scheme whereby a daily backup (the son), a weekly backup (the father) and a monthly backup (the grandfather) are created to maintain a good backup strategy.

Simply put, each week the backup from the last 7-days (daily backup) is aggregated into 1 backup called the son and is held as the weekly backup. Each 4-weekly is then aggregated from a son to a father and is held as the monthly backup and finally the last 6 months is then aggregated from a father into a grandfather and becomes the last 6-months backup. This process can vary depending on your retention policy, your legal requirements for completing data backups and how often you implement a backup (i.e. hourly vs. daily or monthly vs. 6-monthly).

For legal purposes in building your retention policy you need to consider what the impact would be if you needed to recover lost data and over what period. If for example your backup policy was:

  • Daily backups – 7 days
  • Weekly backups – 4 weeks
  • Monthly backups – 6 Months

This would mean that for an initial loss of data that was immediately recognised by a user you would resort back to the previous day, if however, the mistake wasn’t immediately acknowledged, and it was a couple of weeks later you would resort to looking through weekly logs for the missing file and if the issue didn’t manifest a good few months later you would have to restore to searching in the last 6-months log for the file. However, you now need to consider if this is both acceptable for your business and for the data subject. It could be that the impact on business might have a financial cost or it could be that a data subject has put in a SAR (Subject Access Request) which must be complied with within 30-days (under GDPR) and you don’t have the information at hand. Therefore, a policy needs to be clearly drafted considering all scenarios considering the worst-case scenario’s

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OneDrive – Archive vs. Sync Mode

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OneDrive is an amazing tool to allow users to access the same files from multiple devices. However, what if you don’t want to sync files to all of these devices but instead you just want to archive a bunch of files off your computer for safe keeping.

This article explains how you can use OneDrive to do just that.

What is OneDrive?

OneDrive is a cloud platform that provides storage space to save photos or documents and then be able to access them from any device, anywhere. You can use your phone, tablet or PC to view, edit and save documents or photos and then be able to continue on from any other device. These files can also be shared with other users and especially users who have Office 365 which can provide a rich real-time collaboration in editing documents very handy if you are working on a joint project.

What is Syncing?

Syncing is the process of uploaded files into the cloud and then have them sync to any other device you have like a phone, PC or tablet. The advantage of this is that your files are always accessible from any device anytime and from anywhere. When you alter, add or delete a file then the same process is echoed to all other devices connected to the cloud service.

 

 

What is Archiving

Archiving is the process of uploading files to your cloud storage service but not enabling synchronisation for that particular folder. The advantage of this is that certain files that you don’t want to be available on all your devices are only kept in the cloud which is handy for large files (i.e. video or audio) and means you have created a nice simple place to store files you want to keep (i.e. legal documents, old photographs)

 

Conclusion

Depending on your requirements you can use OneDrive either as a sync service to provide continuous access to files on all your devices or switch off syncronisation for particular folders that you don’t and instead use those folders as an archive. Remember if you want to access files and folders that you have setup to be “archive” or “Cloud Only” you won’t see them on your PC but instead you would have to login to the cloud service to access them.

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OneDrive Placeholders is Back!!!

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OneDrive Placeholders is Back!!!

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Back in the day of Windows 8 Microsoft introduced a cool feature that allowed users to keep their files stored in the cloud and use the built-in file explorer to see these files and access them without taking up precious storage space. However, when Microsoft released Windows 10 the feature simply disappeared.

Now after a very long wait Microsoft are releasing the Fall Creators Update (Due for worldwide release 17th, October 2017 and officially version 1709 build number 16299) which will include the return of placeholders under the new name “Files On-Demand”.

Placeholders, are a simple concept of storing all your files in the cloud instead of on the device, thus saving storage space on new devices like tablets and mobile devices that utilise small SSD (Solid State Disk) storage that typically hold only gigabytes of data. When the user opens a file it is simply downloaded from the cloud and opened in the appropriate application.

Previously, if you wanted to access your cloud files you had to choose which folders to “sync” to your PC this meant that not all the files you had could be accessed without logging-in to OneDrive web access.

With the new File On-Demand service, you now have three different methods of keeping your files.

Online-only files don’t take up space on your computer. You see a cloud icon for each online-only file in File Explorer, but the file doesn’t download to your device until you open it. You can’t open online-only files when your device isn’t connected to the Internet.

 

When you open an online-only file, it downloads to your device and becomes a locally available file. You can open a locally available file anytime, even without Internet access. If you need more space, you can change the file back to online only. Just right-click the file and select “Free up space.”

Only files that you mark as “Always keep on this device” have the green circle with the white check mark. These files download to your device and take up space, but they’re always there for you even when you’re offline.

 

The new feature has been long awaited for many users of tablets, hybrid tablets and mobiles. You can read more information on the Microsoft website. You can also read more about the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update here.

See Also:

OneDrive – Archive vs. Sync Mode

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