Bernadette Bean quoted my thoughts on the subject and her answer as follows:

Bob Dalton wrote "Just because you can [store everything on a pin-head],
doesn't mean you should."

Bernadette said:

"Well some IT folks will argue vehemently otherwise Bob (they already do)
and their arguments are popular - the . Most folks (even IT) seem to agree
that we can't destroy everything. So, we're left with two options

Option 1) Disposal program - involving humans who are well trained to make
decisions...it's labour intensive and therefore expensive and subject to
both human error and Monday-morning quarterbacking of the worst kind)

Option 2) Keep everything - no human intervention at the transaction level
required, no nasty "what-if" arguments with lawyers or historians,.".....

Actually Option 2 makes a lot of sense.  We would no longer have to have
retention schedules, audits or have to worry about compliance issues since
everything will be retained forever.  We would no longer have laws passed
with legal retention requirements since it everything will be retained
forever.

While it may make a lot of sense for IT folks, trial lawyers, historians,
archivists, and the lazy, it is still an expense on the company that could
be avoided, plus the requirement by the IT folks to be able to extract every
document in the system in a litigation going back to that forever date would
be a nightmare.  In Australia it may not be a problem, but litigations and
the requirements for legal discovery in this country it is and would be a
very, very costly affair.

For example, the State of Washington and probably most of the states, have a
public disclosure law, which in essence allows every citizen in this state
to make a request for public documents.  There is no charge for the search
(labor), only a nominal fee $.15 per page printed.  At recent meeting held
by the Attorney General's Office, on changes to the law, I noted and
mentioned when it was my time to speak as a citizen, that I noted that there
were 4 groups of people at the meeting;  (1)  A state senator who voted for
the law that passed along the cost of the program down to local level (an
unfunded mandate which is prohibited by law and ignored), (2) local agencies
who are being overwhelmed with requests since there isn't a funded position
to manage the program; (3)  Newspapers who make large requests (fishing
expeditions) for documents (email, electronic, paper); and myself, (4) a
taxpayer who is paying for the searches for people who are using the
information for profit.  If I had been the last speaker I would have added a
couple more categories (1)  people making request and then not picking up
the documents;  (2)  people making requests just because they could (one had
submitted 150+ request over a 5 year period);  genuine requests that were
being ignored by government agencies who could ignore them unless you wanted
to go to the expense of suing.  Having said all that:  One person in the
audience came to me afterward and thanked me for speaking and said he was
served with request from a newspaper for 2000 email from one person within
their agency.  All his time and that of his IT department had to be devoted
to the extraction of the email, then a review of each and every email to
insure their were no legal issues that would preclude disclosure (privacy)
and/or rquire redaction.

In addition, the email may refer to another document in paper or electronic
format.  The email maybe only one of many documents on the subject being
written about.  Using the logic of retaining the email forever since it is
the easiest way to manage email, then you must also retain any other
documents (paper or in electronic format - word, excel, etc.) to insure you
have all the documents referred to in the email message and have the ability
to extract them from your electronic email and document management system.
If you don't then the email message in itself may be worthless and/or may
become non-defensible item in a litigation since the other documents would
have been destroyed in the normal course of business, if they follow a will
written and followed retention schedule.

I hope this makes sense as it has been a long day....

Bob Dalton, CRM

Dalton Consulting

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