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.'"

Comments

Easier to keep

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:Easier to keep

[Daimanta]

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.

Re:Easier to keep

[Sobrique]

Add to that legal requirements of retention - you'll need to filter your 'customer communications' from your 'shopping lists'. That's what actually makes this a nuisance - the possibility that there will be legal action in 5 years time, that you'll need to fight.

Yes, less data need to be kept, but first there needs to be a _massive_ re-education of the 'data packrat' culture that the users of it have.

Re:Easier to keep

[sunking2]

Cheaper to keep. Every hour I waste cleaning house costs more than it does to keep it stored. Storage continues to get cheaper, salaries typically don't. Sure, that $1.25M is a big scary number. But nothing compared to the salaries/benefits at a 5000 person company. Now you can argue the cost of data retrieval goes way up because chances are it'll take a hell of a lot longer to find, but that's a different argument altogether and you can just as easily question what the cost of not being able to recover something that was cleaned by accident is.

Re:Easier to keep

[daeg]

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.

Re:Easier to keep

[cmause]

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.

Huh?

[qoncept]

$250k a year for a 5000 employee company? To put it in perspective, if the average employee at this company is making $60k a year, this company will be paying $1.5 billion in salaries over the same 5 years. To be fair, I think the estimated cost from the article is very much underestimated. But while corporate storage costs more than you'd think, and companies are definately storing a whole bunch of data they don't need, what about the costs of reviewing and purging that data? That is straight up time, whether it's reviewing existing data or spending the time to create guidelines for which data to keep. And time costs money. More than storage.

10 GB user data? Not likely

[arth1]

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.

It's not the storage... it's the apps

[paulhar]

Apps aren't really well designed for this in mind. They don't come at the problem from a "document lifecycle" perspective but instead a "document creation".

This is generally because data has a variable lifespan. Lets take an email as part of a project as an example. As the author I may decide that the email isn't needed after a week so set an expiry of 1 week. But you, as the recipient, may take that email and turn that into several tasks so for you the email is much more important and thus want to keep it for much longer.

Users aren't really going to be good at making these decisions unless some application continually bombards them with "go check the status of these 1000 documents you've got".

Re:hmm

[MrMr]

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).

Email Attachments

[whisper_jeff]

I don't know what most major companies' policies are regarding backing up emails (just back up the text or back up emails plus attachments) but, as but one example, I'm sure this would be an easy spot for most companies to dramatically reduce the amount of storage space required. Most business communications I see from corporate personnel have various attachments on every email - things like logos, custom backgrounds, etc. Forget getting rid of all the unnecessary attachments - getting rid of the "look at my pretty email that looks like a page from a spiral-bound notebook with my company logo at the bottom" images, and the hundreds and thousands of duplicates of those images, would reduce storage requirements, bandwidth requirements, and probably make corporate communications look more, you know, professional. So many emails are filled with unnecessary garbage and, if that's being backed up, that garbage can get costly.

Then again, I'm biased - I believe email should just be pure text. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm now old...

Yes--deleting costs money!

[mkcmkc]

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation on just this question in 2004, and estimated that file deletion was not productive unless we could do it at a rate of at least 17MB per minute (of labor). Four years later the threshold is probably at least 45MB per minute.

Generally, this means that if we can blow away whole disks or huge directories of data, it may pay off. Users going through their files one by one is usually an absolute waste.