From Information Week: ”Many organizations are sitting on stockpiles of dangerous materials. No, we’re not talking about hazardous chemicals or unstable explosives. We mean backup tapes, which are routinely included in requests to produce electronically stored information (ESI) as part of potential or ongoing litigation.
The e-discovery realm is rife with cautionary tales of organizations tripped up by backup tapes. For instance, in 2009 a judge fined a defendant more than $1 million for failing to retrieve information stored on backup tapes. In the same year, the government’s Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight was compelled by a court to search its off-site disaster recovery backups for ESI, a search that ended up costing the agency $6 million–a jaw-dropping amount for a single discovery exercise. What’s even scarier is that the agency wasn’t even a party in the lawsuit; it had simply been subpoenaed for documents in litigation involving Fannie Mae.
This article examines the challenges that backup tapes pose. It also discusses strategies organizations can use to reduce the number of tapes that get stockpiled, and it outlines technologies and services that help reduce the cost and time it takes to retrieve ESI from tape.”
Information Week – E-Discovery: How To Avoid Death By Backup
