Storage and Preservation

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 page gives advice on establishing agreements with commercial storage providers for the storage of physical State records. It does not provide advice on the storage of State archives.

The page provides information and guidance to public offices in meeting their statutory obligations under the State Records Act 1998 for the ‘safe custody and proper preservation’ of State records when they are stored with service providers based outside of NSW.

The State Records Act 1998 (NSW) specifically addresses the importance of protecting records. Section 11 provides that "each public office must ensure the safe custody and proper preservation of the State’s records that it has control of."

This page of advice is designed for records managers to distribute to staff and other records users. The guidance pertains to the handling of records which have a physical format, for example paper files and documents, volumes and registers, maps, plans, charts, and drawings.

Section 11 of the State Records Act 1998 requires each public office to ensure the safe custody and proper preservation of the State’s records that it has control of. This means protecting, and thus preserving, the record through appropriate storage facilities and conditions, ensuring that the record is handled appropriately by staff, and protecting the records if a disaster should happen.