Backup and retention 600



  • One company’s approach to backup/restore and retention is that backup serves the purpose of providing the means for business continuity and that no need exists to use backup media for long term retention. They take the position that all in-scope applications have historical components to their databases allowing for archiving of data for several years and that this is sufficient. So what is everyone doing out there to cover this?
    Also, with respect to emails, since email doesn’t have any archival databases, per se, this raises the additional question of how emails are treated for long term data retention purposes.
    Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.



  • We took a similar approach to the backups stance. We have a bit different situation in that our CFO has stated that we would not rely on electronically archived versions of financial data - we would refer to good old paper. Obviously, for a tech company, we’re a bit backwards in that area, but it works well for us in IT.
    I am steering the department into a bit different direction, which is as much IT centric as anything, and that is not using tapes for DR/BC, but only for long term archival (yeah, we do it anyway 🙂 ) We’re moving more towards cross-site replication of our data, and that will become our DR method, not tapes any more.
    On the email retention - I think that is becoming a pain in the rear for just about every IT group now. We have most of our management staff that thinks that email is nothing but a legal timebomb and wants it gone, but I am working it from the other way - we need to move towards a model where we keep absolutely everything for a pre-defined period (say 3 years). It isn’t really SOX related, but as any public company knows, lawsuits are a fact of life, and having to spend days restoring old backups of exchange servers is a real drag on efficiency.


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