Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Legal Freeze / Frozen Media

2009-02-17 10:05:26
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Legal Freeze / Frozen Media
From: Ed Wilts <ewilts AT ewilts DOT org>
To: "Martin, Jonathan" <JMARTI05 AT intersil DOT com>
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:38:02 -0600
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 7:48 AM, Martin, Jonathan <JMARTI05 AT intersil DOT com> wrote:
 
We've recently been hit by a number of legal actions requiring media to be frozen and I'm trying to refine my procedure.  There has always been a request that I save the catalog entries for the media that are being frozen.  After trying this, I've found that we simply don't have enough space on the images lun to do this.  What I've done instead is to output what images are on the media to the frozen media document so at least if data is required and the catalog is purged, we know which ones to scan / import first.  Does anyone have a better idea than this?  I've also considered making a special catalog backup (what a hassle to restore though) or archiving the images.
 
Further, I'm pretty good about requesting media back and if they are frozen returning them as indefinite retention / frozen.  However, I fear my co-workers may be less diligent with their restores.  (One in particular returned an LTO3 media to me this week in a SDLT Media case.)  Is there some way short of a sharpie to safely mark / label these media as frozen?  I'm just looking for ideas.

Speaking from experience here, don't touch the MEDIA - do all your work with IMAGES.  Determine which IMAGES need to be kept and then set an appropriate retention period on them.  NetBackup takes care of the media handling required.  If you do anything with the media, you're setting yourself up for failure like what you may run into with your coworkers.  As long as a piece of media has valid non-expired images on it, whether they came back from offiste or not isn't an issue.  And yes, we've recalled all media with infinite retention, recalculated the correct expiration dates, and sent them offsite again.

The fun part is overlapping legal actions - i.e. 2 holds for the same image.  You need to be very careful that when you're given the ok to do the unfreeze that you don't accidentally destroy images that are also required for a seperate action.  This is common if the hold is on email.

For each legal action and for each image, save the original expiration date and then change the retention period on the associated images.  When you're given the go-ahead to expire the images, you can now search the original logs to see if any other action requires those images.  If so, do nothing.  If not, set the images back to their original expiration dates.

Whether or not you keep catalog backups depends on how often you are asked to actually do something with the media.  In our case, we've had a few legal holds but nobody ended up asking us to do a restore. 

We also keep a lun for the catalog to include these holds.  So far it hasn't been a problem, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the cost of doing business.  If we have to hold everything for longer and need to double the size of the catalog, so be it.
 
One of the challenges we have, and I'm guessing that everybody else has, is that lawyers never tell when the legal hold has expired.  You have to continually hound them so you can expire the images and reuse the tapes (which can save you thousands of dollars).  From seminars I've been to, apparently the lawyers have to tell you at time of discovery how long the hold is supposed to be for.  For some reason, that information has never made it to the backup group though...
    .../Ed

Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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