Backup Tape Retention Policy

Hi Perkolater,
As far as I am aware there is no law relating to this subject.
The policy that was used when I worked for a company involved 7 tapes, 1 for each day of the week, swapped daily, with the one from Monday being taken home andreturned the following week, so the furthest back we went was a week.
Hope this helps.

The policy depends greatly on the environment. Is your business regulated by any governing agency? Ask them. In most cases, it?s up to the business to decide. Next, ask the users. Do they require lots of restores? In my business I?m asked ?canI restore a spreadsheet I had last year somewhere between 05/01/01 and 07/31/01??. So what do the users need?

All said, best procedure I have uses in many COs is;

Incremental Weekday tapes (M-T) save for one-two weeks.
Full Friday tapes, save for six months.
Full Month tapes, save for one year.

I Actually save monthly?s indefinitely. Doesn?t cost much, and has saved me tons of trouble several times.

You back up to protect your self. The reason you make daily backups and store off site is as follows.

You back up on monday. On tuesday a file that is not used much gets scrambled. So tuesday's backup is of the corrupted file.

The point is at some time you are going to find out that the file is bad. That is the time cycle you have to determine.

Some companies will backup daily with a 30 day rotation cycle before they start reusing the tapes. Some companies only do a week rotation, (crazy).

The sites that I set up do daily backups that go into a rotation cycle that is determined by the type of business they are in. I also recommend doing a Master backup bimonthly or monthly that is not in the daily rotation, this is stored for a minimum of quarterly.

Another note. Use a good brand of tapes. Watch your backup logs and cull out the error tapes immediately.

Hope this rambling has helped.

Good Luck

You may want to check with your legal department if any regulations are in place. Example: health, financial, legal are usually permanent. Also, the governament can provide you with regualations and suggestions. There is a good magazine (FREE) SMS Storage Magagement www.wwpi.com. Generally speaking most companies will do daily backups, only if the data has changed, sent the tapes off site. Weekly backups are generally done over weekend and sent off site on Monday. All the weeklys are brought back and kept maybe 30 days max. The same process applies for the monthly backups replacing the weeklys. etc. Another rule of thumb- when is the last time for had to get the tapes to restore something? Hope this helps out. I haven't seen a tape question in a long time and have mostly retired from the tape field. If you need any more help, give me call.

I appreciate all of your time and advice.