Arbor Business Continuity Recommendations

As a cloud-based system, Arbor maintains a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan, which is regularly audited and tested, to make sure we’re ready to deal with any issues.

However, in case of downtime, you may not be able to access your data directly via Arbor.

To prepare for that, we’ve suggested some things that you can do to make sure you always have access to the data you need to operate in case of a disruption.

Your network settings

Check your internet connection

A stable internet connection is required for any cloud-based software to work properly, so it is worth thinking about whether your current connection is reliable enough. Our recommended internet bandwidth is 2MB.

Check your Firewalls and Network Security

Occasionally, your network security can impact your ability to access Arbor. This is most likely to affect tasks that require uploading or downloading data. Please check with your IT team that your network isn't blocking any data from Arbor.

Built-In Reports

We recommend all schools download a copy of your Emergency Printable Register in the morning so it's available if required: Printing an Emergency Evacuation Register

You can also print out registers for the coming week: 

• Primary Schools can use the Students > Attendance > Reports > Weekly Printable Register by Registration Form page. This will generate a PDF containing all of the registers for the whole week.
• Secondaries can use the Students > Attendance > Reports > Printable Lesson Registers page. Input the end date of next week, and this will generate a PDF containing all of the registers for each scheduled lesson.

You can email these PDFs to a secure email address, or store in a secure password-protected online folder. 

Creating a Key Information report for Student and Staff Data

To make sure you always have a central backup of student emergency contact details, medical conditions and dietary requirements, we’ve attached a Weekly Student BackUp report to the bottom of this article. We would recommend that this report is either put into a live feed or emailed weekly to your Headteacher and/or SLT. 

We have also created a document for staff containing medical conditions, dietary requirements, next of kin and contact details.

If there are other fields you would like to add you can edit the report once you’ve uploaded the template into your Arbor. 

To import this into your Arbor click the link at the bottom of the article to download our Weekly Student Back up template to your computer.

Go to School > Custom Report Writer. Click the Create New Report button, then select the option to Import a Report.

Click Browse to select the template file from your computer, then click Upload. 

Sending out the report

It’s up to you if you want to create the report as an email or live feed, you'll see instructions for both below.

Whichever you choose, make sure to protect access to your data by storing it in a secure place with password and access protection. This falls under GDPR data protection regulations due to the data it will hold.

Creating a live feed from the report

To create a live feed from the report select to download the table as a Live Feed. You can then see how to create the live feed here: Using Live Feeds

As part of your continuity plan, you should either:

• have the data automatically refresh and copy the data from the live feed into a separate sheet and paste 'values only'.
• manually refresh the data

We suggest you determine the frequency at which you undertake this activity within your school's business continuity plan. 

Schedule the report via email to open in excel

Select Schedule Report from the left-hand menu.

Select the report to run on the day you require and choose the first day to run the report and the time. Choose a staff member to email or add an email address to email. You can then choose the message and schedule the email to be sent to the selected recipients.

The person who the email has been sent to will need to open the attachment to see the student data.