ListServ Colleagues -

I have searched the Listserv archive and google for direction on this topic and 
now I want to present it to the listserv. 

I have been partnering with IT Storage to look at our largest archive 
repositories and attempt to set retention. Most of them are legacy archives 
that no one is familiar with and have outlasted their usefulness. Our 
organization has incremental backups that occur and are retained for business 
continuity/disaster recovery for short periods of time. 

This particular question is in regards to archives which are typically above and 
beyond what is already held in the production system or data warehouse. 
Often times these archives are set up "just in case we need them." In this 
case we have a business unit that has a defined retention of 7 years on their 
financial/actuarial data maintained in a data warehouse. They have historically 
done a full archive of the data warehouse every month thus creating one of 
the largest stores of information we currently maintain. 

My solution was to say 1) why do we need to archive this data at all? 2) if we 
do need to archive it then why can't we maintain the data in the data 
warehouse for 5 years then archive it for 2 years and once it hits the 7 year 
retention dispose of it. This was met with that the data warehouse is 
continually updated and data is overwritten which is why they have it set up 
for a monthly archive. It seems to me that the business unit should have a 
better process in their database to make sure that old data isn't overwritten 
and archiving it really isn't the answer and not meant to be used in this 
manner. 

Does that seem like the appropriate course of action/response to everyone? 
Any alternative courses of action? Anyone have any comments/suggestions on 
this? Has anyone experienced this arrangement and what did you do to 
resolve this? Any experience with Data Warehousing retention?

Thanks 
Rob Giganti 
Enterprise Information & Records Management Specialist 
COUNTRY® Financial 

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