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.

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.

Knowing your business and your business information needs, planning any integrations with current business systems well, planning for the stability and longevity of your core business information, being aware of the information-related impacts of system change, planning and managing change, deploying metadata requirements strategically, and assessing your need for system documentation requirements will help determine information management requirements when developing new corporate systems.

The Building the Archives policy outlines the objectives that guide the identification of State archives by State Records NSW.

The policy below was approved by the Board of State Records NSW in April 2024 and replaces the previous policy published in 2001.

The purpose of this section of the guidelines is to:

  • examine common reasons why back-capture digitisation projects are undertaken (i.e. what benefits they can bring)
  • explore some considerations relevant to these reasons.