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SmartSummary
- Purpose of archives – How will the archives be used and what types of data
are stored?
- Value of data vs. cost of maintaining archive – Is it more costly to
maintain the archive than the value of the data?
- Types of archives – Are the tapes organized by department, project, year,
machines, or something else?
- Tape formats – Do you have equipment that can still read all the tape
formats?
- Is the equipment properly tuned and maintained?
- Tape storage – Have the tapes been stored in a climate controlled off-site
environment?
- Retrieval – Are procedures defined for access and retrieval of the
data?
What seems like a simple request for information actually
pinpoints a number of issues that you will need to look at to create a data
archive management policy appropriate for your company. As a
privately held company, your business for the most part is not
required to follow standard policies and best practices for
records maintenance. However, many private companies find it
convenient to create records management policies in line with Sarbanes-Oxley and
other government-mandated guidelines. To address your immediate
archive problem, you will need to approach the project from two
directions. First, you will need to develop a data management
policy that sets the length of time that you will maintain various types of data
records, what form they will take, and most importantly, operational procedures
for retrieving the data from the archives. Work with company
management, the financial department and legal to set a realistic archiving
policy – forever is not an option. Sarbanes-Oxley and the
IRS require seven years for financial
records, so that is not a bad place to start from. Include in the policy
processes for reviewing the backup technologies themselves. As the
cost of near-line and on-line storage comes down, many companies are opting to
maintain larger data sets on-line rather than archiving them off to tape or
DVD (for smaller data sets).
At the 50,000 foot level, data archives can be thought of as
information that becomes increasingly less relevant over time.
Current financial records are highly valuable and must be fully
protected, while15 year old records are of mostly historical interest and,
unless there is a pending lawsuit, of little actual value to the on-going
operations of your company. At the same time as the content of
the tape archives are aging, the tapes themselves are slowly deteriorating and
the equipment and software to read the tapes is becoming less able to read
them. Even if you could retrieve the records from 18 year old nine-track
reel-to-reel tapes, unless the records were maintained in ASCII textformat, you
might not even have the application to read and interpret the data.
Over time, as the cost of retrieval rises,the value of the data
drops. At some point in time (which will vary on the type of data
and company policy), the cost of maintaining the archives will exceed the
value. When that point is reached the tapes can be safely
destroyed and discarded.
The first task in the creation of your data records archiving
policy will be to take an inventory of your current set of records.
Identify all the different backup media and equipment for creating and
retrieving records from the media. Various kinds of tapes, DVDs,
CDs, floppies,and optical drives have all been used as archive technology in the
past 20 years. If all the records are on asingle type of backup
medium, the task is somewhat simplified, but it is important to confirm that old
tapes are still readable by the equipment. In the past I have had
trouble with 8mm and 4mm DAT drives getting out of alignment over time and not
being able to read tapes created on other drives, or in one case on the same
drive, after it had been repaired and realigned. Once you have
identified your hardware and media, you need to review your backup and records
management software. Depending on how the archives were originally
created, data retrieval might be easy or a nightmare. For example,
if the tapes were all created and labeled by machine name, and the machines had
a mix of engineering documents, financial records, and random e-mail archives,
then the ability to retrieve the data could well be seriously
compromised. If the archive tapes are organized by project, year,
or some other more humanly meaningful way, then retrieval time could be
significantly reduced. Modern tape management and backup
software such as Veritas Backup Exec tend to be more oriented toward creating
tapes that will be used forsystem recovery rather than for archive
purposes. If you do not currently have an archive management
system they do exist, but the software is quite different from the more common
backup software. Many of these systems are document management
databases rather than tape management systems. A discussion of
these types of systems for your archiving needs is,beyond the scope of the this
inquiry.
Once your policies have been implemented, you can then cut your
tape archive set to a more manageable and well managed number.
With proper tape management it is possible to significantly reduce
off-site storage costs. Remember to test your retrieval procedures
regularly. Too many companies have found to their dismay that
those great backup archives they were so carefully maintaining were completely
blank or they couldn’t be read because the equipment was no longer functional or
available.
SmartActions
Create an archiving policy based on the record keeping
requirements of your company. Determine if you have the properly
maintained equipment to read any old archives. If you do not, and
the tapes are older than the records policy requirements, look for cost savings
from reducing the number and types of tape archives that are kept in controlled
off-site storage. Remember to test your archive retrieval
procedures on a regular basis. | 
