Unreal Archiving Strategies II

Published by Tim Anderson | Filed under Tim Anderson, Storage Consultant

Greetings again from the field! This is the second installment of real-world horror stories of disturbing Archival “best practices.” The second scenario (Tape as an Archive) is one I have seen many times, from companies of all sizes, and in a number of cases, is still the de facto standard for a long-term archival repository.

Company #2 Scenario- This organization’s archival strategy is to backup their data to tape and retain it for an infinite period of time. Then, the backup admin grabs those tapes on a monthly basis, puts them in the trunk of his car, and then takes them home to his basement. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up. This completely caught me off guard, as I thought at least they would use an onsite fire safe or an offsite vaulting facility. When I was asking the customer what his thoughts were on the situation, he seemed fine with it, which made me shake my head even more. I’ll bet his business owners wouldn’t be fine with it if they new the serious risks they were taking in using this method as a way to preserve their most critical data-sets.

Major Concerns- First off, a few concerns that stand out are the unbelievable storage of these archival tapes at someone’s house. Just speculate for a second on all of the problems with this scenario (Floods, Fire, My Dog ate my tapes etc). Using backup software presents many other problems for archival. One, unless they are very diligent in restoring those tapes on, at least, an annual basis and re-writing them back to newer tapes again to ensure the data and media are still viable, and two, refreshing any changes to the data-set based on a backup software upgrade and/or replacement. What happens when the backup software is upgraded or replaced by a new one? Get ready to sit for months restoring and backing up again. Finally, an immense area of concern is the ability to discover this information for litigation or simply because someone needs it. There’s another long process that, by the time you are done, if you can even find the data, your company probably lost the case already due to the time lag or your internal customer had to go without or recreate the data from memory or other sources.

The Fix – The good thing here is after meeting with this company’s CIO, not only was he unaware of this practice, but he was actually disturbed that someone from the outside discovered it first. Electing to move forward with Permabit, we were able to help them streamline this process and move the existing critical data from tape to our online Value Tier storage. Then we worked with them to put automated processes and procedures in place to ensure that there long-term data storage requirements were met with our robust data safety, reliability, and most importantly, at a price point that was as cost-effective, if not more when looking at overall management costs, than tape.