Records Retention – Backups, Archives and Revisions Last Updated May 2025 On this page: University Policy Revisions Archives of Deleted Web Pages Online Crawlers That Archive Automated Backups Decommissioned Website Archives University Policy The University of Texas at Austin Records Retention Schedule provides detailed guidance on the retention requirements for records created, received, used, and stored by or on behalf of the university at the Records and Information Management Services website The requirements may change and should be reviewed for your particular content. Generally, as of this writing, maintain promotional and informational materials shared on websites for 2 years and information on websites about public education and outreach programs for 4 years. Tip: UT Box has an auto-delete setting for folders that can be utilized to help adhere to the policies. Revisions Our Drupal and WordPress websites automatically maintain versions of each revision of the page as you edit. On WordPress in the Editor interface, there is a “Revisions” block. On Drupal there is a “Revisions” tab. Archives of Deleted Web Pages You are advised to un-publish and archive relevant content rather than delete it. See instructions for Drupal or instructions for WordPress. These instructions are specific to our instances only. Online Crawlers That Archive Websites like the Way Back Machine, https://web.archive.org/ crawl the internet and take snapshots at various times of the state of the website. Automated Backups Automated backups are conducted by various systems in the website’s infrastructure. They are usually not easily accessed because they contain all the pieces of the website in separate compressed formats that will require considerable effort and time to reassemble for access. They are primarily designed for disaster recovery. System Backup Examples: The website hosting providers each have an automated backup system for disaster recovery. Also, the code for the websites is in a versioned code repository. Decommissioned Website Archives When our Drupal websites are rebuilt or decommissioned the web team will keep a copy available on the the campus network for internal users to access and reference for two to four years, as long as the infrastructure is available. A final longer-term back up of the website as separate compressed formats is saved. When our WordPress websites are decommissioned a compressed back up of the files and database is captured.
