Retention of deleted/archived material

[Jez Watts]

I'm interested to find out how your university handles deleted or archived content and what your policy is for how long you should keep it?

 

We currently retain:

• all deleted pages
• all deleted resources (such as documents, images, etc)
• the version history of all published pages

Queensland State Archives policy suggests this is correct for data contained within a content management system but does not stipulate a retention period.

 

Regards.

Jez.

 

Jez Watts
Web Development Coordinator
Marketing and Communications
University of the Sunshine Coast
Australia
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Web: www.usc.edu.au

[Michael Fienen]

Legal requirements vs. what makes sense can be two completely different things. The question boils down to: "How long is useful?" How often do you find yourself going back to pull something out of an archive, and how far back was it? Make a reasonable assessment based on that.

[Jez Watts]

Thanks Michael, we occassionally get requests for old conference material and content not much older than 1 year. We'll shortly be migrating content to a new CMS and would rather not have to take it all with us and don't want legacy servers hanging around, however, I'm a bit nervous to completely ignore our legal requirements and you can bet Sod's law will kick in as soon as. It's annoying that legislators are so vague on this one.