>Arguing Back-Up Tapes Are Not Reasonably Accessible  The Defendants
explained > the responsive data was on 5,880 back-up tapes.  
>Further, it would take 1.5 hours to catalog a tape and 1 hour to restore (or
>14,700 hours).
>

This argument of 'undue burden to produce' comes up regularly, but it should
fall on deaf ears in many cases. Why do they exist if there was never an
intent to use them?

The argument should be made what were they intending to do with these 5,880
'backup tapes', and why were they retained for as long as they were?  Also,
if the information (potentially) contained on these tapes would have been
beneficial to THEIR SIDE OF THE CASE, would they have searched them, at
whatever cost?

Backup tapes are intended to be used to restore systems in the event of a
catastrophic event, or a system crash, and practices/procedures should
ensure that they are overwritten or otherwise discarded as soon as they are
no longer useful for that purpose.  

If, for example, an organization has a policy that all e-mail that is a
'record' be transferred to an ERMS and non-record material left in either in
boxes or sent mail folders is automatically discarded after 180 days, then
the backup tapes should not be held longer than that.  

The concept of even holding backup tapes for 180 days seems ludicrous,
especially if backups are generated daily, weekly, or monthly.  Whatever is
on a 6 month old tape should be completely useless and using it to restore a
system would result in overwriting data that has subsequently been modified
or destroyed 'in the course of normal business'.

Organizations need to take a more holistic look at how policies, procedures
and practices are written to ensure they are consistent across the various
functions within their span.  If Records Management writes a policy that
includes a retention schedule, and the policy states that 'reference copies
can be discarded when no longer in use, but shall not be retained longer
than record copies' and/or what backups represent and what their intended
use is, IT procedures and practices should be consistent with those.

Larry
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