GET RID OF THEM!

No, seriously. Backup tapes are disaster recovery things, not archival
things. They are a royal pain to deal with when it comes time to restore a
particular file - and if/when that discovery request comes in, that
exacerbates the problem in that all of the info has to be restored and
sorted through, or else the tapes get turned over to opposing counsel who
will be happy to use the opportunity for a fishing expedition.

The Sedona Conference has just solicited comments on its "The Sedona
Guidelines: Best Practices Guidelines and Commentary for Managing
Information and Records in the Electronic Age"; one of their recommendations
(3d) is "Absent a legal requirement to the contrary, organizations may
recycle or destroy hardware or media that contain data retained for business
continuity or disaster recovery purposes."

Similarly, the President of ARMA, David McDermott, will testify next week
before the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial
Conference of the United States. His comments will address the proposed
amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure involving electronic
discovery as submitted by the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure. (from ARMA home page).  One of ARMA's comments is that
"Similarly, good records management practices distinguish between backup
tapes which are used for disaster recovery or restoration of data to a
server, mainframe or personal computer, and records being retained in an
electronic form in order to meet requirements of a retention schedule.
Backup tapes should not be relied upon to meet retention requirements, due
to the recognized difficulties and expenses associated with searching and
retrieving data for a specific purpose. We support the verbiage in the
comments section to the proposed amendments to Rule 26(b)(2) that indicate
information stored solely for disaster-recovery purposes may be expensive
and difficult to recover for purposes of discovery."

You can find the full text of the comments at
http://www.arma.org/pdf/press/0105JudicialConferenceComments.pdf.

Finally, there's another really good reason to get rid of at least the older
ones - there is a good chance they are not compatible with your current
hardware, in which case there is a false sense of security in having them
and an exhorbitant cost to be incurred upon receipt of a discovery request.
The cost to migrate them to current technology, assuming it can be done,
will also be quite high. Better to update the policy to reflect any specific
legal requirements that address disaster recovery requirements for retention
and then get rid of the rest of them, and clarify the policy to indicate
that backups will henceforth be kept only long enough to meet specific
business continuity requirements.

Regards,

Jesse Wilkins
CDIA+, LIT, EDP, ICP
IMERGE Consulting
(303) 574-1455 office
(303) 484-4142 fax
[log in to unmask]
http://www.imergeconsult.com



>From: Laura Boldt <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Back up tapes
>Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 10:26:50 -0800
>
>I work for an engineering firm in the US with multiple offices.  Our IS
>department is looking at how long to keep back up tapes and what is the
>best way to keep them.  Currently they are still retaining all back up
>tapes from the beginning of the company 28 years ago.  I know this is a
>records management issue but at least it is being addressed and the
>network guy who is investigating this issue will listen to what I have
>to say.  Unfortunately, it sounds like he is under the gun and needs to
>come up with a solution in a couple of weeks.  At this point he is
>thinking of storing them at Iron Mountain with their electronic
>archives.
>
>We do have a retention schedule but it needs a lot of work.  At this
>time it only covers hard copy project files.  This will be addressed in
>the near future.
>
>Any advice would be appreciated.
>
>Laura Boldt
>Records Management Supervisor
>David Evans and Associates
>[log in to unmask]
>
>List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
>Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance

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