Re: [Veritas-bu] Retaining Date for 20 years+

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:20 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net> wrote:

I started to do work for a small firm that has been removing legacy old kit and media as its 15+ years out of date (example: PC's acting as Servers, DDS tape drives, 3M Data Cartridges, (mini ones too!! amnd legacy Unix systems.

Now, what I was puzzled about is "how would they go about restoring this Data?", considering most of the Technology has just been removed / phased out.

It got me thinking that we have 5 - 10+ year retention of Tapes for NetBackup on LTO1 tapes but no means of loading it, you do not have high hopes of restoring it. Unless you obtain an LTO1 drive. But say 30 years down the line..... then what! Chances are, NetBackup may not read it, or worse.... No NetBackup environment at all ! (Similar to the client who was using their own standard 1990's backup software that is no longer produced and in a format that cannot be read!)

So really, curious how people would "protect" those essential years of Data?

There are a lot of 3rd party companies that will gladly take your money to restore this data. I suspect they're not cheap for the obvious reason that they have to maintain this old crap, but that's the price you pay for restoring stuff you probably shouldn't have been backing up in the first place.

Even if you get the data physically off of tape, can you actually do anything with it? Do you even know the name, for example, of the server that held your financial data 15 years ago? Even if you had that data, do have the hardware and software that can actually do anything with that data? Are the applications so old that they won't even run on modern hardware? Are the data formats so old that today's applications won't open them either?

Backups are not archives, and you're seeing one of the many reasons why that's true.

.../Ed

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