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About IST backup service

About IST backup service

Owned by Ryan Ahn
Last updated: Apr 16, 2025 by Eric Hochban
2 min read

The Information Systems and Technology (IST) Backup Service is a centrally managed service designed to offer departments, system administrators and faculty a reliable, high-performance, low-cost solution for backing up servers and workstations at the University of Waterloo.

Service availability

The IST Backup Service is available to staff, faculty and departments at the University. Any system (server, workstation, laptop, etc.) that can run Veeam agent software can be backed up. To back up physical machines running Windows, Linux, Unix or macOS operating systems, Veeam Backup & Replication uses backup agents installed on each computer.

Charging rates

The cost for the IST Backup Service is an annual fee based on anticipated usage for the year, including a fixed license fee for each server. Users of the service are charged annually in advance on May 1 of each year. New users will experience three months of backup service to determine their usage and then will be charged a pro-rated fee for the rest of the upcoming year.

Pricing notes

  • Cost:

    • $300/yr for each client device.

    • $0.75/GB/year for storage. This is based on the compressed size of the data.

      • Our storage solution typically compresses by about 100x on average*

        • *compression is variable based on many factors including the type of data

      • This means that 500GB would likely be compressed to around 5GB.

      • We only round UP, if you use 1MB of any GB you will be charged for that full GB.

    • Billing will not start until after we calculate 3 months of data.

      • If the cost is deemed too great after the initial 3 months we can stop backups and delete the initial data at no charge.

    • On yearly renewals you prepay for an estimated usage for the year based on the increase or decrease over the previous year.

    • If at any point during the service year a client crosses a TB threshold (ie from under 1TB to >1Tb, or from xTB to (x+1)TB we will convene a meeting to discuss this and the client will be required to pay for the additional capacity at that time.

    • We require an account code to bill in order to begin backups.

Backup schedule, retention and storage

  • Clients are backed up once daily, with additional full backups every weekend, and once quarterly.

  • We keep backups for the following retention periods:

    • daily backups are kept for 10 days

    • weekly backups are kept for 5 weeks

    • quarterly backups are kept for 1 year

  • All backup data will exist on campus in our data center. Any data that is still present after 30 days (weekly and yearly backups) are transferred to a cloud repository.

    • The cloud datacenter is located in Canada.

    • Data in the cloud datacenter is fully encrypted and immutable until it expires (after one year).

Data and file recovery

  • To recover data from a backup please submit a ticket to the IST Service Desk

    • File self-restore is not available at this time.

 

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