> From: "Stearns, Jason" <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Subject: Backup Strategies
> 
> As part of a Defensible Deletion effort focusing on legacy Backup Tapes, my firm will be revising its approach to backup creation and retention.  I have been asked to collect information on peer practices as part of our review process.
> 
> If you are able and willing to share your organization’s approach to backup creation and retention, please contact me directly.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your assistance.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Jason



And herein lies the conflict:
>> I have been asked to collect information on peer practices as part of our review process.

How far back does records management have to go before there was a unified plan.  You classify records, you set a retention plan, you vault the Vital Records and when the records hit their end of life, they were destroyed if no pending litigation was on the horizon.  The data center created back up tapes for disaster recovery, not records management.

I have been to three events recently and the methodology and technology of back-ups is as diverse as there is vendors to offer solutions.  In many cases, the organization no longer creates back-up tapes, they don’t even attach tape drives to the data center so there is no possible back-up on tape.

Many send everything to the Cloud.  They believe the Cloud can provide all back up data in some fashion.

Some even rely on their Cloud vendor to provide a back-up tape if they need it.  But what would they do with it.  So they count on a back up drive being available from the vendor.  Does any one test to see if that methodology would even work.

Where is a Policy on this from the world’s largest records management body?  We truly live in a Tower of Babel world where everyone is speaking a different language.  When did Records Managers decide to turn the records management policy and procedures over to the Big Data vendors? I think when Federal Judges entered the world of records management with Sarbanes Oxley, ESI, Rule 26 and so on, there was no effective response from records managers and electronic machine readable records were born

I predict Jason, that you will hear as many strategies for back up and retention as there are trees in the forest.

I think an opportunity exists that if a select group of records managers developed a Task Group and presented a new strategy that knitted this all together, that records management could survive.

Cost of storage, accuracy and evidential value make protecting the back up tapes a viable strategy and the records manager should control that.  When back-up tapes disappear then records management become as ephemeral as a drop of oil on a still pond on a sunny day.

We are almost to the point where the earliest Cloud storage by virtue of the software agreement turns over the data to the Cloud provider.  Google just announced they would take our search data, use artificial intelligence to organize it and then sell that data to vendors.  To me that is a violation of my PII.  I am not a sum of my internet activity; or, one would assume I might be a records manager by my posts here.  (Larry you stop that laughing! ) 

I keep looking for the warning from the records management community at large to the corporate world that they are months away from seeing their title to their records disappear. 

Yes there should be secure back up tapes. And Federal Judges should step in and command Google and Amazon et al,  to stop data mining our searches, our emails, our corporate back ups in the Cloud and treat this information and data as a trade secret.  Our national security could be at risk.  Our corporation’s susceptibility to sabotage and other risks as yet undefined.

We recently had the head of the Supreme Court in Pennsylvania unseated because he sent some jokes of questionable nature via email, then the Attorney General who was chasing him got caught up in her own email scandal.   Google and Big Data now take on God like powers or more like an all powerful tyrant if all information in the Cloud now belongs to them.

How great would it be to see the top records managers present a white paper to the Supreme Court arguing the danger the Cloud and the search engines represent to society.  They are the new FBI with Hoover at the helm.  Or a saboteur ready to sell our most inner secrets to the highest bidder. This is even more troublesome,if as Dick King pointed out, sophisticated computer geeks can alter the records in a manner that even forensics cannot discern.

A records management task group of the top 10 (or as many that will co-sign the letter) records managers from this Listserve could make that case in a friend of the court brief. You now have “standing” as the NFPA just added electronic records to the Protection of Records Standard.  Soon Pandora will be turned loose from the Cloud.  No time to waste.


Hugh Smith
FIRELOCK Fireproof Modular Vaults
[log in to unmask]
(610)  756-4440    Fax (610)  756-4134
WWW.FIRELOCK.COM


List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
To unsubscribe from this list, click the below link. If not already present, place UNSUBSCRIBE RECMGMT-L or UNSUB RECMGMT-L in the body of the message.
mailto:[log in to unmask]