We have traditionally done weekly full's for a 3 month retention, and 
one of the fulls in the month is marked for permanent archive.
With NB4.5, the calendar scheduler allows me to schedule the first 
Saturday of the month to be the permanent archive.
Instead of duplicating the fulls, we have enough space to run another 
full on Sunday, which is always a 3 month retention.
The Monday- Friday backups are incrementals, with a 3 week retention.

With over 60 clients, and most of them running an oracle database, this 
is about 6TB written per week, 12 - 14 LTO-1 tapes going offsite each week.

Part of our business may require retentions of  7 years for all data and 
lab notebooks, including databases either to prove intellectual 
property, or to obtain FDA approval on a product.  Considering how tape 
technology evolves, this can become a very large task with tremendous 
legacy support, and the cost of tapes won't be a problem.

We have also been discussing the impact of archiving e-mail from MS 
Exchange, and Voicemail from our unified messaging server.  This can be 
useful provide a history of communications, or can be the downfall for 
someone if they are incriminated by their correspondence.  So far, we 
don't hold email or voicemail for longer than 3 weeks, and mostly for DR 
purposes.

-Jon

>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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