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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.'"

2 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re:hmm by MrMr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

  2. Re:Easier to keep by cmause · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There used to be a sort of gentlemen's agreement between attorneys to not dig in to electronically stored information (ESI). That was back when everything important ended up on paper anyway, which was discoverable.

    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.