Designing, Implementing & Managing Systems

This guide provides a checklist against which an existing or new business system may be assessed to determine:

• whether the business the system supports is subject to any recordkeeping requirements
• how well the business system is currently functioning  or will function as a recordkeeping system
• what action may be required to enable the business system to meet recordkeeping requirements.

Backups serve a very important purpose: they provide protection against many forms of data loss by creating multiple, regular, distributed copies. While they ensure short-term integrity, they are not intended to store data over a long period of time. Rather, they are designed to restore a system to a fixed time and date, and are dependent on maintaining the infrastructure of the system they back up.

Many NSW public offices have accumulated large amounts of data in legacy systems. The purpose of this guidance is to draw together advice and procedures to allow public offices to identify legacy systems, and identify and overcome the barriers to dealing with the data in those systems through migration and decommissioning as a routine component of its information management and technology program.

Removable media is storage media which is designed to be removed from a computer. Removable media is low cost, portable and simple, allowing people to copy, store and carry large quantities of data easily between locations. Employees can share information easily and access it from a variety of locations, which can increase the organisation’s productivity. However there are a number of risks associated with the use of removable media.