Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Retention Periods and Industry practices.

2003-02-12 17:12:41
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Retention Periods and Industry practices.
From: joe AT joe DOT net (Johnny Oestergaard)
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:12:41 +0100
Roberto I don't think there is an right or wrong answer to this.

At our installation every single system has been evaluated and the business 
side have told what they need.
We have been asking them for minimum req. not nice to have. And when they 
came with things that was "way off" we just went back and asked them again 
(sometimes tellling them what a given service would cost them)
The initial req. for email was a multi million USD project and ended up 
with a cost of less then USD 20.000 when we came down to what they realy 
realy needed in a D/R situation. We have some systems where 4 hours 
downtime is max (in D/R) but most of them turned out to have a window of 7 
days or more and this changed the total cost of D/R in our installation 
down to something we could handle.
But management had to tell us what they needed and approve it later (and 
also paying for it)

To keep the total cost down we pooled some of the B/R needs and D/R needs 
together. (eg one system with 2 weeks retention was pooled together with 4 
other systems with 5 weeks retention giving all of them 5 weeks)

The simple way most of our systems are backed up are:

All backups are Full backups.

Daily backups           8 (or 10) days retention
Weekly backups          5 weeks
montly backups          was 1 year but we will go down to 18 weeks
Quaterly backups        1 year
Yearly backups          5 years

But it all depends on your systems and data. Always look at your business 
needs and your data. What is perfect in one installation could be very very 
wrong in another.

A lot of years ago I was in a rail company that implemented a system to 
control all cargo and wagons running on their rail system. This was in 1983 
or 1984. For all other systems we took a weekly backup to store offsite but 
not for this system. Every one in operations looked at the systemowners 
like ?????
They just told us that no data in the system would ever be more them 5 days 
old so taking a backup off site to restore in a D/R situation was worth 
nothing to them. In a D/R situation they would just have us get a new 
mainframe up and running, restore the application and define an empty 
database. (it was the same people that gave us our service window on a 
normal workday from 10:00 to 12:00 (and it was AM)

My short advice is to let management and not IT decide what kind of backups 
they need (but use business language not IT to ask them)
Then IT can come back and tell them what it will cost. In most installation 
this will give you less problems then letting IT solve all the problems.

/johnny

At 11:36 12-02-2003 -0600, Robert Johannes wrote:
>At my site, the bosses are thinking of reducing the retention level to 3
>months from 1 year, in an effort to save on the amount of money we spend
>on tapes per year.  Before this happens however, I would like to gather
>information as far as what is considered standard practice.  What do you
>all do?  Please respond with the sight that standard backups are not an
>archival system, and indeed, the concern at my site is not archiving but
>normal backup retention practices.
>
>thanks
>roberto
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