On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 1:47 PM, Kevin Tisdel <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> To our company, backup tapes are copies of the official record and are not
> to be kept any longer than the retention period of the business record.
> Our ongoing issue are system snapshots (blanket backup of everything)
> greater than 2 weeks old.
>
> Does anyone else keep the backup tapes greater than two weeks?


I would agree that a short retention period would be advisable, and as you
said under NO CONDITIONS should a backup retain information longer than the
official records are retained.

The duration of the retention of backups should be determined by a number of
factors. Those would include the volume of information
generated/collected/changed on a daily basis, the number of nodes or storage
points on the system (if using a RAID or NAS you may have multiple copies of
live data available in your production environment), the availability of
offsite or 'mirrored storage' to be used to restore primary systems, and the
criticality of the information to business continuity.

There are many ways to setup the procedures for backups, and depending on if
they are complete backups or incremental backups that represent a snapshot
in time, you may elect to set different retention periods for them.   Some
of this is based on the IT practices, but again, as you said, they should
never be retained longer than the retention period of the official record,
and they should not be retained any longer than any business purpose they
are intended to serve.

The longest periods I'm accustomed to seeing are 30 days in a business
environment.

Larry

-- 
Larry Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972

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