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Re: [Veritas-bu] Retaining Date for 20 years+
2010-05-19 08:25:37
We’ve gone through exercises of
saving infinite retention backups of systems that we know we can’t
recreate easily (for example there was one that had a dongle from the vendor
required to run the app – we had to return the dongle to avoid continuing
to pay license fees). The idea is if you have the data you have a base from
which to start. It’s a lot easier to tell someone wanting ancient data
that the technology no longer exists or is cost prohibitive to recover than to
tell them you didn’t bother to back it up in the first place.
Also as was mentioned earlier in thread we
too have gone through the exercise of duplicating old media to newer media. Interestingly
management recently realized how much it was costing to keep things at Iron Mountain
that they no longer knew why they had it except it was “legacy”
from our big merger years ago. They pretty much had all of it returned so it
could be destroyed (or in rare circumstance kept).
I would think a client that actually
needed 20 years worth of information (e.g. a bank retaining mortgages) would
likely keep that as “current” information or in a data warehouse.
One of the things that came out of the recent housing mess is that there has
NOT been much thought about keeping information long term (even past 7 years)
for this and also information gets lost in the shuffle when the original lender
sells the loan to someone else to service. Many people have stopped or
delayed foreclosure by using the legal requirement that the financial
institution starting the foreclosure process actually produce the original
records showing they are in fact the owner of the note.
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 7:31
AM
To: WEAVER, Simon (external)
Cc:
VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu]
Retaining Date for 20 years+
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:20 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net>
wrote:
I started to do work for a small firm that has been removing
legacy old kit and media as its 15+ years out of date (example: PC's acting as
Servers, DDS tape drives, 3M Data Cartridges, (mini ones too!! amnd legacy Unix
systems.
Now, what I was puzzled about is "how would they go
about restoring this Data?", considering most of the Technology has just
been removed / phased out.
It got me thinking that we have 5 - 10+ year retention of
Tapes for NetBackup on LTO1 tapes but no means of loading it, you do not have
high hopes of restoring it. Unless you obtain an LTO1 drive. But say 30 years
down the line..... then what! Chances are, NetBackup may not read it, or
worse.... No NetBackup environment at all ! (Similar to the client who was
using their own standard 1990's backup software that is no longer produced and
in a format that cannot be read!)
So really, curious how people would "protect" those
essential years of Data?
There are a lot of 3rd party companies that will gladly take your money to
restore this data. I suspect they're not cheap for the obvious reason
that they have to maintain this old crap, but that's the price you pay for
restoring stuff you probably shouldn't have been backing up in the first place.
Even if you get the data physically off of tape, can you actually do anything
with it? Do you even know the name, for example, of the server that held your
financial data 15 years ago? Even if you had that data, do have the
hardware and software that can actually do anything with that data? Are the
applications so old that they won't even run on modern hardware? Are the
data formats so old that today's applications won't open them either?
Backups are not archives, and you're seeing one of the many reasons why that's
true.
.../Ed
Proud partner. Susan G. Komen for the Cure.
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