I havn't read the SBO requirements, but from our internal auditors, it looks like we need to have a good business best efforts to keep readable for whatever retention period we publicize.
In working with older tape technology in storing archive tapes, we found that 20% of the tapes were not readable within 5 years. It seems that the best idea for long term archives is they need to be re-read on a regular basis (annually?) just to make sure they can be read. The only time I have heard of a real application that must have 'everything forever' was a TSM application where they were storing a local and remote copy of documentation (and each version) for a nuclear power plant. In that case, I think they used a WORM library both locally and remotely. I didn't design it and don't know the details, just that it 'had to work'. It got expensive, but that is what the federal regulators requried. -----Original Message----- From: Shannon Bach [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, July 19, 2004 12:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Thoughts on Monthly Archives For us, it is the beginning of the Sarbanes-Oxley overhaul. I ask those same questions to people all over my company and their response? Well you (me) had better make sure that the data moves with whatever new Technoloogy comes in! They don't care if we have the software capable of reading this data again. They just want to be in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. And it is starting to look to me that Sarbanes-Oxley believes in keeping everything, forever. Andrew Raibeck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 07/19/2004 11:25 AM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Re: Thoughts on Monthly Archives Some considerations for long-term archive: - Much of today's data, as it is used from day to day, exists in some product-specific format. If you were to retrieve that data, say, 10 years from now, would you have software capable of reading that data? - Even if you archive the software, will operating systems 10 years from now be able to run that software? - Even if you archive the operating system installation files, will the hardware 10 years from now be able to install and run that operating system? - There is a good case to consider carefully what gets archived and how you archive it.For instance, maybe for database data, it would make sense to export that data to some common format, such as tab- or comma-delimited records, which is very likely to be importable by most software. Likewise, for image data, consider a format that is common today and likely to be common tomorrow. - 10 years from now, the people that need to retrieve the archived data will probably not be the same people who originally archived the data. Will your successors know what that data is? Will they know how to get to it? ("Gee, we need to get at the accounts payable database from 10 years ago... under which node is it archived?") Will they know how to reconstruct it, and how to use it? I am by no means an expert in this area, but these are some things to consider carefully for long-term archives. Note that most of these issues are not directly related to TSM, but apply regardless of which data storage tool you use. Regards, Andy Andy Raibeck IBM Software Group Tivoli Storage Manager Client Development Internal Notes e-mail: Andrew Raibeck/Tucson/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Internet e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The only dumb question is the one that goes unasked. The command line is your friend. "Good enough" is the enemy of excellence.
