03-Apr-2007

Accounts

User accounts must be reconfirmed on an annual basis. On September 1st of each year, all Sponsors will be notified and must login to their account management web interface within a month to validate their own accounts and to affirm/update the status of their Sponsored Accounts. This is the time in which sponsors should account for such things as graduate students becoming staff members or leaving the university, departing group members, and any changes or additions to the projects they sponsor. We would also ask that you take this time to verify that user and project data storage is being used exclusively for active, current projects. The web interface will support all the necessary changes. Accounts that are not reviewed by October 1 of that year will be locked out pending sponsorship.

Data

The Research Computing Support Group (RCSG) will retain all data (i.e. will not intentionally erase data) for all user accounts for a period of one year after the account is either closed or pending sponsorship. It is important to note that retention is not equal to backup, recovery and archiving.

Backup, Recovery, and Archiving

Backing up and archiving data remains the sole responsibility of the end user. At this point in time the shared computing enterprise does not offer these services in any automated way. We strongly encourage all users to take full advantage of Central IT's storage services, departmental servers, and/or individual group resources to prevent accidental loss or deletion of critical data. Please feel free to contact the RCSG for advice on best practices in data management (e.g. IT's Subversion (SVN) services provide the safest environment for maintaining and developing source code). We welcome any suggestions for offering a higher level of data security as we move forward with shared computing at Rice.