In my view, there's no fatal objection to big bucket retention. The
problems are practical: The bigger the bucket, the longer its retention
period must be, since the retention period must accommodate all required or
desirable retention periods for any single item within the bucket. This in
turn means higher storage costs, larger and more difficult (and thereby more
costly) searches, more discovery and more of everything else associated with
having records around longer, which could wind up being very expensive
indeed, and perhaps impractical or impossible as well.
If analysis reveals that this is a worthwhile tradeoff for administrative
convenience, then big bucket is fine; however, you have to do the analysis
to find out if this is true, and you still have to do all of the work to
make sure they're the right buckets with the right retention periods, so you
wind up creating a detailed schedule and then nesting it up into broad
categories. And of course, you still need an index or file plan and all of
the rest.
I think that as a practical matter, once the bucket gets past a certain
size, the equation doesn't work for many records. For example, an
"environmental" bucket would contain records with retention period ranging
from very long (50 years to indefinite) to very short (a couple of years).
In this case the simplicity of administration does not, in my view,
compensate for the very substantial downside of the big bucket.
Bottom line: I don't think that it will work well for everything, and if
you use it, you have to optimize your bucket size to accommodate other
considerations. That will mean retention of fairly granular record series
for at least some records.
John Montaņa, General Counsel
PelliGroup, Inc.
29 Parsons Road
Landenberg PA 19350
610-255-1588
484-832-3260 mobile
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www.pelligroup.com
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