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To Purge Or Not To Purge Your Data

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-much-prefer-the-binging-part dept.

Lucas123 writes "The average company pays from $1 million to $3 million per terabyte of data during legal e-discovery. The average employee generates 10GB of data per year at a cost of $5 per gigabyte to back it up — so a 5,000-worker company will pay out $1.25 million for five years of storage. So while you need to pay attention to retaining data for business and legal requirements, experts say you also need to be keeping less, according to a story on Computerworld. The problem is, most organizations hang on to more data than they need, for much longer than they should. 'Many people would prefer to throw technology at the problem than address it at a business level by making changes in policies and processes.'"

4 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Easier to keep by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem is that it's easier to just archive the cruft stuff than it is to go through it all and figure out what's worth keeping.

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
    1. Re:Easier to keep by Daimanta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      True, proper archiving takes huge amounts of time since it adds overhead to your operation.

      In an ideal world, everything that you store is automatically labeled and old data will automagically be purged. But storing all kinds of shit is just that much easier. It also doesn't help that data storage is so dirtcheap. 1TB can be bought for around $100 if I am not mistaken. It doesn't pay to kill old useless stuff you have floating on your hard disk.

      --
      Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    2. Re:Easier to keep by daeg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The bigger problem is that you will fight different battles. If you're fighting a sales rep that sold your clients to a competitor, you want as much ammunition as possible. If a client is suing you for incorrect information relayed 8 years ago and you're probably guilty, you want as little information as possible.

  2. 10 GB user data? Not likely by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    10 GB of data per user, sure.
    10 GB of user data, no way.
    If assuming 300 work days per employee, that would mean that the average employee creates 1.2 kB of data per second.

    The only way this could be true is if you count data that isn't user generated, and they count the total data storage for the company and divide it by employees.
    If so, users deleting their e-mails won't have much of an effect.