Why Student Data Belongs on Your Own Machine

A student record is not ordinary business data. The people it describes cannot consent to how it is stored, and they carry the consequences for decades.

An examination record contains a minor's name, photograph, date of birth, guardian details and academic history in one row. That combination is enough to impersonate them at any institution they later apply to, which is why it deserves a different standard of care from a mailing list.

Keeping it local is the simplest form of that care. There is no third party to audit, no transfer to secure, and no vendor whose retention policy you have to read. The trade-off is honest: backups become your responsibility, and a lost machine is a lost register unless you have practised the restore.

So practise it. Take a backup on a schedule you can state out loud, keep one copy off the premises, and restore it onto a spare machine once a term. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a procedure.