Best Practices in Keeping Data for Years

Keeping archived data for years is very cumbersome. The problem with long-term archived data is that it must be retrievable through many generations of infrastructure technology.

 

Many organizations use existing tape backup resources for long-term archival of data.  This is accomplished by simply creating a policy that has a long retention period.  Most of these companies understand that offsite tapes stored for a period of time need to be refreshed. So, on a periodic basis, they retrieve the tapes and make tape-to-tape fresh copies. 

 

This media life cycle maintenance continues until the “archived” technology is replaced.   When this occurs, most diligent organizations will restore the archived data to disk and backup the data using the new technology. Of course this back file conversion increases the complexity of the implementation of the new infrastructure. But, by doing so, this process accomplishes a couple of things. First, it verifies that the archived data can be restored with the current infrastructure, and secondly, it updates the archived data with the current infrastructure. 

 

Periodically, we are asked, “How can we make sure that the technology we use today for archival will be around in X number of years?” The simple answer is, “You can’t.”

 

What is at the root of this type question is a poor assumption that once you archive data (using whatever method or media you prefer) you can forget about it. The truth is, you must maintain your archive’s technology using a lifecycle process. To think that any technology will be around in X years is a very risky bet.

 

While choosing the most promising technology for your archive data does increase the distance between technology refreshes, it will not relieve you from the responsibility of actually doing the refresh.

 

I feel very comfortable, for instance, that optical media has a longer shelve life than tape.  Therefore, if I can economically use optical media for my archive, I would. In addition, I would replace the optical reader when it is end of life with the appropriate technology at that time.

 

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