Making the determination to decide what level of classification the information requires is the main responsibility of the data owner.

The data owner within classification is a person from Management who has been entrusted with a data set that belong to the company. It could be for example the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who has been entrusted with all financial date or it could be the Human Resource Director who has been entrusted with all Human Resource data. The information owner will decide what classification will be applied to the data based on Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Criticality, and Sensitivity of the data.

The Custodian is the technical person who will implement the proper classification on objects in accordance with the Data Owner. The custodian DOES NOT decide what classification to apply, it is the Data Owner who will dictate to the Custodian what is the classification to apply.

NOTE:

The term Data Owner is also used within Discretionary Access Control (DAC). Within DAC it means the person who has created an object. For example, if I create a file on my system then I am the owner of the file and I can decide who else could get access to the file. It is left to my discretion. Within DAC access is granted based solely on the Identity of the subject, this is why sometimes DAC is referred to as Identity Based Access Control.

The other choices were not the best answer

Running regular backups is the responsibility of custodian.

Audit the data users is the responsibility of the auditors

Periodically check the validity and accuracy of the data is not one of the data owner responsibility

Reference(s) used for this question:

KRUTZ, Ronald L. & VINES, Russel D., The CISSP Prep Guide: Mastering the Ten Domains of Computer Security, John Wiley & Sons, 2001, Page 14, Chapter 1: Security Management Practices.