On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Howard Bampton <[email protected]>wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:20 PM, David Parter <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >
> > From a technical point of view... I don't know what the requirements
> > are. Obviously, we want to preserve the data. I am sure others have
> > already come up with requirements and solutions to avoid, detect and
> > hopefully correct bit rot...
>
> If you are archiving a project, you may well need more than just the data-
>
>
Howard brings up some excellent points -- you need to consider a lot of
things in addition to the data.  As for products, though, there are a lot
of ways to handle this.

At the simplest, you need to find a product that allows you retention
locking capabilities.  This can be done in a database, in software, or at
the storage layer.  Many NAS systems provide some way of specifying
retention locking to various degrees.  In some cases it's simplistic and
can be overridden, and in a few cases they do it for legal or regulatory
compliance and once you lock down a volume/disk/directory, even the
superuser cannot remove it short of swapping out the physical hardware.
 NetApp has several kinds of compliance that you can enable (for a fee,
naturally) like this.

There are object-based storage systems like EMC's Centera, which they call
"CAS" for "content-addressable storage".  It uses an API that many software
packages can use to place data into various levels of retention.

You could even conceivably roll your own SQL-flavored database that
prevents anyone but the administrator from going in and deleting stuff,
again depending on whether you require simple retention to protect against
accidental deletion or compliance locking for legal or regulatory reasons.

As an aside, I would pedantically point out that traditional backups are
not a disaster recovery tool -- they are an operational recovery tool.  DR
has a lot more involved, including replication, offsite services,
infrastructure replacement/rebuilding, etc.

-Adam
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