Slow Students of Archiving

Brian Fonseca at Computerworld reports that the mayor of Washington has abandoned an email retention policy that would have automatically and permanently erased government emails after a six month term. This announcement took place at about the same time that AP reported that US Justice H. Kennedy ordered the White House to preserve copies of all of its emails in an ongoing disagreement with the Archivist of the United States.

Issues of archiving are commonplace in the trade and now the mainstream press. There are many reasons for public officials to want to do extensive deletion of files, some legit and some less so. Emails are now business records, as important as any contract or warranty. They have evidentiary value in courts of law all over the country. They keep businesses going in a way faxes and wires never could match. But they are also instruments that could seal a company's liability or a government agency's guilt or innocence. They also take up megabytes and megabytes of storage.

As far as the government battles are concerned, I simply see them as slow students. Archiving is a fact of life, and anyone who protests that it costs too much or takes too much staff time is howling in the wind. Business is seeing the inevitability because of regulatory mandates and the persistent fear of litigation that infects the nation. Trying to whitewash a political legacy, another purpose of deleting emails, is useless...the truth will ultimately out. No matter what you think of de-duplication, there is a copy out there somewhere.

With all of the excellent software out there for archiving purposes, lost emails will increasingly become suspect. Archiving and retrieval will become a mainstay of data management, and effective data management is the foundation of the efficient storage infrastructure. The most lively debate, however, is what kind of hardware and media is to act as our archiving technology of choice. Hard disk is doing its level best to take center stage in archiving, as it is in operational and transaction processing. Tape technology and optical technology also have strong cases to make that they are either the more economical approach or the approach that delivers the most longevity. Plasmon, a leader in optical technology, is preparing to introduce a new optical archiving product, and has named a new CEO to push the tech.

Some consider the primacy of hard disk a manifest destiny, due to a dropping price per megabyte and the performance delivered by spin physics. Some think tape and VTL are merely postponing the inevitable. What do you think?

By the way, have you ever noticed that the press coverage in the trades focus on the retention of these invaluable emails, but look much less frequently at their secure destruction?

Cheers.