26 March 2009 -- Version 1.5
The Ferrum College Email Retention Policy establishes the practices of the Information Services staff regarding the storage and retention of email communications. This policy does not address or constrain what individual members of the College community may do regarding email storage and retention on their personal or College-owned computers.
The Ferrum College Email Retention Policy is implemented and managed by the Information Services staff, administered by the Chief Information Officer, reviewed by the Information Services Advisory Committee (ISAC), and approved by the Ferrum College Administrative Council (AC). This policy can be modified and approved on an as-needed basis.
Ferrum College will store and retain faculty/staff email communications on College servers and backup tapes for only thirty (30) days from the email’s origination date. There will be no storage or retention of Student/Alumni email communications on Ferrum servers. Student/Alumni email communications are housed on Google’s servers and the owner of the individual account determines which content is retained and for how long the content is retained.
The two known exceptions to this policy are as follows. First, if the faculty/staff email recipient has deleted the email message from the College email servers (either by intentional deletion or by downloading the email to a local computer and not leaving a copy on the server), the email will be retained by the College for only five (5) days from the deletion date. Second, because Information Services creates a daily backup copy of email data only Sunday through Thursday (i.e., backups created on Friday and Saturday are overwritten by Sunday’s data), any email messages received after the Friday’s backup and before the subsequent Sunday backup may not be retained if the email server has to be restored during this time due to a mechanical, electronic, software, or other failure of the email server or other network devices.
The Director of Network Services is responsible for preparing and filing Incident Reports for all network and server failures that might affect email receipt, email retention and storage, or other email services.
In the event of such a failure, the Director of Network Services will notify the Chief Information Officer that the Incident Report has been completed and that all email services have been restored to a fully operational state. The Chief Information Officer will prepare a written review o f these Incident Reports at the end of every quarter for review by ISAC and AC.