UTBackup Faculty and Staff Service

OVERVIEW

The Information Security Office (ISO) and Information Technology Services are happy to announce that standard UTBackup service continues to be available at no cost to all campus faculty and staff members subject to the details listed below. A rate review was conducted in the Summer of 2014 and resulted in a lower charge per gigabyte (see below).

DETAILS

1. All faculty members, as defined by official campus affiliation, will be provided the following at no cost:
   • UTBackup software license and maintenance for all their devices through August 2014
   • starting September 1st, 2013 faculty subsidized quotas are 100 gigabytes per device per year of compressed, de-duplicated backup data (on the backup server)
   • general support from the ITS Help Desk in addition to support provided by local departmental IT support staff.
2. All staff members, as defined by official campus affiliation, will be provided the following at no cost:
   • UTBackup software license and maintenance for all their devices through August 2014
   • starting September 1st, 2013 staff will receive subsidized quotas of 20 gigabytes per device per year of compressed, de-duplicated backup data (on the backup server)
   • general support from the ITS Help Desk in addition to support provided by local departmental IT support staff.
3. This subsidy will be available only via the ITS provided UTBackup service (http://www.utexas.edu/its/utbackup).
4. Each unit will associate faculty members’ devices with a UTBackup child organization labeled 'DEPT-Faculty', and staff member's' devices with a UTBackup child organization labeled 'DEPT-Staff', so that accounting and billing processes can be consistently carried out. Please remember to include a dash between the org name and its appended suffix of "staff" or "faculty".   
   1. While this subsidized service will be limited to faculty and staff members, ITS User Services will address other potential use cases on a case-by-case basis.
   2. The Technical Support Coordinators (TSCs) managing the unit's collection of systems in UTBackup will be entrusted to manage their systems and will only locate faculty systems in the 'DEPT-Faculty' child organization and staff systems in the 'DEPT-Staff' organization .
      1. TSCs will create UTBackup installers for faculty and staff so that their devices will automatically associate with the unit’s respective ‘Faculty’ and 'Staff' subfolders.
5. If the unit’s storage aggregate for its faculty and staff users of UTBackup does not exceed the subsidized allocation amount (average 100 Gig per Faculty member device and average 20 Gig per staff device) then no bill will be issued.  If the aggregate amount does exceed the total subsidized allocation amount, a bill will be created and added to any existing UTBackup charges for the college or department.

Example

A unit has 5 faculty members, each with 2 devices located in the UTBackup ‘Faculty’ child organization (or 10 total devices). The total no-cost storage aggregate for this subfolder would be 1000 gigabytes. The unit will not be billed unless the ‘Faculty’ subfolder consumes more than 1000 gigabytes of compressed, de-duplicated storage. Any billable storage will be billed at a standard rate of $0.35 per gigabyte (lower rate began 8-1-2014).

Frequently Asked Questions

I want to sign up for the Faculty or Staff service, where do I go?

Answer: Faculty or staff should contact their local IT support staff directly for assistance using the service. Faculty and staff may also query the ITS Help Desk for information on whom to contact in their department. Department TSCs may sign up to manage UTBackup for their department should use the service form here: http://www.utexas.edu/its/utbackup/ or contact the ITS Help Desk .

My department purchased a number of UTBackup licenses for Faculty and Staff use. Will these license purchases be refunded?

Answer: UTBackup licenses are considered a consumable commodity, much like software applications, and as such are not refundable after purchase. Departments may, however, utilize all purchased licensing as they see fit.

Will subsidized storage consumption up to this service offering be credited to my department on our end of fiscal year billing?

Answer: Storage consumption will continue to be billed in accordance with service agreements in place at the time of use. No cost storage (Faculty: 100GB per year per device, Staff: 20GB per year per device) will apply starting with this new service offering when those accounts are housed in DEPT-Faculty/-Staff child organizations.

I need to customize how the UTBackup service works for faculty (or staff) and I already have a child organization configured to do this. Must all faculty (or staff) accounts be placed in the DEPT-Faculty (DEPT-Staff) child organizations?

Answer: Yes, to avoid including faculty (or Staff) in standard billing calculations they must reside in a DEPT-Faculty (or DEPT-Staff) child organization. If the 'DEPT-Faculty/-Staff' child organization is not suited to your preferences it may be modified to suit but must retain the existing -faculty/-staff appended naming convention.   If configuration adjustments for authentication methods are required please contact the ITS Help Desk or the UTBackup service Admins.

How does this impact those of us who have already been setting up our faculty or staff users on the UTBackup service? Will we need to re-install new custom clients?

Answer: Generally there should be no impact to existing UTBackup clients. Simply move the faculty or staff user accounts from their current organization to the one labeled "DEPT-faculty" or "DEPT-Staff". This can also be accomplished by relocating an  organization as a child org of "DEPT-faculty" or "DEPT-Staff" and appending its name with "-faculty" or "-staff".  There is no need to reinstall clients and there will be no missed backups.