Back Up on Backup Tapes

Time and time again in our consulting practice, we have encountered companies which have stored critical business information on backup tapes. Backup tapes are essential for companies to be protected in the unlikely event of a disaster, but may be the worst possible medium for long-term information archiving or retention, because that’s not what they were designed to do.

Unlike hard drives, backup tapes store information sequentially—files are written one after the other onto the tape. That means in order to retrieve a particular file, you must read all of the files written before it. This is fine when you are using tapes for disaster recovery—you want to write all of the files to the tape, and when you are restoring a system, you want to read all of the files back onto the new system. In a disaster recovery scenario, the loss of a single tape is not a big deal – multiple system backups are usually made in case of an individual tape failure.

However, backup tapes are the wrong medium for long-term retention of company records. If you know the particular file you want, you might have to wait a little while to retrieve it if it is located at the end of a tape. If you don’t know the file you want, the situation is much worse—unless you have technology which can search the contents of backup tapes, you may have to restore the tape in order to find the information you want—a process which can take a lot of time and money. If the company is faced with an electronic discovery information request in a lawsuit, the rationale for not using backup tapes for long-term data storage becomes even more obvious. Backup tapes used for disaster recovery are generally reused within a very short period—a few days or a week at most. In the event of a disaster, a firm wants the most recent data possible to bring its systems back up, in order to minimize loss of work. Thus, any electronic data relevant to a lawsuit which might be located on the tapes will be long gone by the time the suit is filed. Courts have recognized this valid use of backup tapes.

On the other hand, courts have held that firms which use backup tapes for long-term data storage could be obligated to search for relevant information on the backup tapes. In most instances, such requests are not a matter of finding individual files on the tape, but require restoration of the tape so that searches can be conducted on file contents. For even medium-size companies with several locations, and several file servers (and several sets of backup tapes), the costs of responding to ediscovery requests can escalate rapidly. That is why the Sedona Conference, a legal think tank, which has done a considerable amount of work in the ediscovery area, has said that backup tapes “should not be used for record keeping.”

The right technology for the activity of record keeping is an archiving system. Archiving systems are designed for the long term retention and ready retrieval of electronic information. Indexing protocols can facilitate retrieval based on standard criteria, while archiving applications are also incorporating increasingly sophisticated searching capabilities. Preservation of information is important as well, as organizations are obligated to preserve information relevant to a suit once they are aware that they are likely to be sued. An archiving system also helps organizations implement a records retention program, which is the only way a company can legitimately dispose of information. Archiving systems help organizations store information in ways that allow it to be retrieved faster, simpler, and cheaper. So you need to ask what activities your organization needs to do—back up or retention, because while both are essential business activities, they require different technology and know-how.

--Lawrence Wescott II, Esq., is a lawyer and a senior consultant for Kahn Consulting, Inc . He is the author of the Electronic Discovery Blog , named one of the top 100 legal blogs by the American Bar Association Journal.

--Randolph A. Kahn, ESQ., is the founder and principle of Kahn Consulting Inc.