Questions flood into my head along the lines of 'what's the difference between a backup and an archive' (obviously not in a TSM sense) and if/ how should they be treated differently practically with TSM (e.g. a seperate TSM Server instance for archival purposes, as some places do etc).
/David Mc Sent from my iPhone On 4 Aug 2009, at 18:45, Troy Barnhart <tbarnh...@rcrh.org> wrote:
Only 7 years? We're in Healthcare. Seven is usually the minimum. If you're talking Minors, then it is 18+7= 25 years. "Digital Mammography" & "Research-related" electronic medical records are FOREVER. There are lots of numbers on time-retention floating around out there - it just depends on the "governing authority". We haven't completed our Retention Policy, so we have tapes from various Operating Systems and Applications from the 1990's. Regards, Troy Barnhart, Sr. Systems Programmer tbarnh...@rcrh.org Regional Health, Inc. 353 Fairmont Boulevard Rapid City, South Dakota 57701 PH: 605-716-8352 / FAX: 605-716-8302 -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Shawn Drew Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 11:15 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] Another perspective on ridiculous retention "Do I understand you to say you have to keep your NDMP backups around for 7 years? The tape media isn't even meant to last for 7 years. Do you have customers that actually think they will need 7 year old copies of you NAS data? That's a tough requirement." I thought I'd change this to a new topic. I hear this type of comment alot on backup forums. From an engineering perspective, it completely makes sense. It also makes sense that people in backup forums think like engineers! Just another perspective. When I started with TSM, I was working for a software development company named "Tivoli" who obviously cared about their backup data. The mantra of the backup guys was "Restores are more important than backups!" I.E. do periodic test restores, and if a restore request comes in and conflicts with a backup. cancel the backup in favor of the restore. Several years later, I start working for a bank. After working here for a few years, I realize the mantra is now the reverse: "Backups are more important than restores". Meaning. the main reason we perform backups and retain them for 7 years, is so we can show an auditor our settings and say we've done it. We very rarely have to restore anything that old, but we very often have to show records of these backups. One last note, I have been involved in legal discovery projects where we actually did have to restore 7 year old data off of old DLT IV tapes. We found tapes with dried up BBQ sauce on them and all sorts of damage. Luckily, between the multiple storage pools we were able to rebuild all the data. The DLTs never actually failed due to age (only by a tomato-based attack!) Regards, Shawn ________________________________________________ Shawn Drew
