Something to keep in mind about backup tapes and retention.  Our IT folks maintained a "permanent" yearly backup tape (actually one tape for each of 11 servers) for several years before I convinced them that most of the info on the tapes were not permanent retention and whittled the "yearly" tape retention down to 3 years.  They were finally convinced that backup tapes were only to be used for "backup" after we went through a rather costly exercise in trying to restore some images from the 3 year old tapes.  A court order asked us to produce check images from certain years that included those dates on the 3 year old tapes.  In fact, we had bought new servers and upgraded to new server operating systems since the older tapes were produced, WITHOUT the network administrator keeping any of the old servers or operating systems available.  In order to pull the images - which existed and therefore had to be produced -  we had to rebuild a server and operating system that could restore the tapes for access.  Lesson well learned.  We now keep the tapes for 60 days.

Ginny Jones 
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI) 
Records Manager 
Information Technology Division 
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities 
Newport News, VA 
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