And one other thing to keep in mind is this.

How often would you even consider restoring months old data to restore your
computer system? Months old email files without any recent emails? Months
old accounting data without any recent daily updates? Almost never, unless
you were an IT person trying to figure out when a database application began
to have a bug or data problem months ago. 99% of the time you want
yesterday's files or maybe this week's data, otherwise you have to guess at
what you were doing recently. If IT ever has to go back to months old backup
tapes to restore data, they had better also start looking for a new job.

Despite almost never using these old tapes for data restoration, they can be
e-discovery gold mines if the current records management program has
failures in producing records. (Who doesn't?) Or is successfully challenged
on its current records policies and procedures, especially regarding emails.
So these backup tapes "archives" are often far more valuable to one's
litigation opponents than they are for your own defense.

John

****************************
John Phillips
Information Technology Decisions
www.infotechdecisions.com
865-966-9413


-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Peter Kurilecz
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 5:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Retention of email backup tapes

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Deanna Hauck <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> I am the records manager at a small liberal arts college. I am working on
> reducing the retention of our email backup tapes and was asked to survey
> what the retention is at other educational institutions and what authority
> have you used to make that decision. Please advise.
>

be sure and conduct a search of the listserv archives. lots of discussions
in the past about email backup tapes.
You'll find that the general consensus is that backup tapes are for disaster
recovery purposes and not for records retention.

If you don't have it you may want to go to the ARMA International bookstore
and purchase a copy of the ANSI/ARMA standard Managing Electronic  Messages
as Records there is also a standard there for titled Retention Management
for Records and Information that is good also


-- 
Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
[log in to unmask]
Richmond, Va
http://twitter.com/RAINbyte
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/RAINbyte/
Information not relevant for my reply has been deleted to reduce the
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