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To Purge Or Not To Purge Your Data
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.'"
The top 500 company I worked for did just the opposite: Destroy all data in case a legal issue comes up.
They called it 'desk cleanout day', and unless you were an official dedicated contact on a particular subject you were to wipe all correspondence of more than a year old.
(There were also other grades of information, but erase after a year was the default).
Lovely scaremongering, but what did they mean by legal e-discovery? The time it takes to sort through the data or what?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
We went paperless, and when application forms, etc. arrive they are scanned and stored. Examination of the data shown that very often people would print out all the existing infromation on a customer and add it to the pile sent for scanning.
Result, look up a customer and you would find some files scanned half a dozen times.
you'll need to filter your 'customer communications' from your 'shopping lists'
Actually, I thought it was a fairly common legal tactic to make the data as difficult to actually find as possible, without revealing too much to the other side.
"They want records from three years ago? Send a truck with printouts of all the files we have, that'll keep them busy..."
Does anyone know that this is no longer the case?
As time went on, fewer things ended up on paper, but the rules of discovery didn't evolve. That was the time of backing up a U-Haul full of printed out copies of every file, e-mail, etc. that a company had. Now the opposition had to dig through mounds of trash in the hopes that they will find that one incriminating document.
Then attorneys got more savvy, and in the so-called Rule 26 (refers to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure), the attorneys would agree on the format of ESI to be exchanged. In December, 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure changed to directly address ESI and electronic discovery.
Now, in litigation, parties may still get obnoxious amounts of data, but it's electronic. Once it's processed and converted (usually to TIFFs with extracted text, but sometimes PDF), attorneys can do what amounts to a Google search through the files and find what they want pretty quickly. In fact, paper documents are usually scanned and OCRed so they can be handled and searched in the same manner.
Actually, I thought it was a fairly common legal tactic to make the data as difficult to actually find as possible, without revealing too much to the other side.
"They want records from three years ago? Send a truck with printouts of all the files we have, that'll keep them busy..."
Does anyone know that this is no longer the case?
So no, it's no longer the case. But the first guy who did it must have thought he was pretty funny.
Congratulations. You're the first person I've seen who understands that.
Accounting understands the need to close one year and open the next. They have processes for what is carried over and how it is identified.
Yet no other department (or application) understands the need to close old data and archive it.