I agree with Larry. A backup is for disaster recovery. 

Storage is traditionally viewed in terms of online, nearline, farline
and offline. 

Online is typically RAID or other magnetic storage media and nearline is
often a jukebox of disks (sometimes optical media) with a somewhat
slower retrieval time. Farline storage could be a tape automated
retrieval system with even slower retrieval time. All are indexed.
Offline is typically not indexed or some rudimentary index remains in
the database. Offline is often tape and thus can be seen as storage
media that would indeed be subject to a retention schedule, as would the
other records in the storage hierarchy. Many times the offline storage
would have to be manually loaded by an operator. This is sometimes
referred to as an "archive" tape, hence the creation of the verb "to
archive." I don't like the term myself.  

Backup tapes are not kept for any appreciable length of time, 30 days at
the most. 

Ray Cunningham

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Larry Medina
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 12:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Best Practices for Backup Tape

>
>
> How do you segregate records with different retention periods on your
> backups?


This is an interesting question... if you think about the reason backup
tapes are made to begin with (to restore a system in the event of a
catastrophic failure or unintentional destruction of information) there
is
no legitimate reason to go to the effort of segregating information on
them
by a retention period.   They should mirror your storage systems that
they
support, and IF those systems have information segregated, then the
backups
would as well.

I can understand how this question would be pertinent to ARCHIVE tapes,
but
it doesn't seem to pertain to backup tapes.

Larry

-- 
Larry Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972

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