Rethinking Backup Tapes The difficult, laborious and expensive restoration
process required to discover data on backup tapes, as recently as 2007, has fallen quite dramatically by the wayside. Auto- matic tape indexing technology replaced traditional restora- tion in 2008, making discovery and collection of tape content fast and easy. As this technology has evolved, it has gotten faster and has added support for more files types and backup formats. Technology has even gone so far as to enable proac- tive tape discovery. Enterprise litigation support teams are processing tape data ahead of a court mandate, so they are armed and ready when the discovery request does come in.
Traditional restoration is a process where the original backup environment is used to restore tape content. Sounds easy, but as time goes by the original tape environment (soft- ware, tape drives, expertise, etc) fades away and is difficult to re-implement. This is why third-party restoration special- ists came into being. They have the legacy environments, however they charge premium fees to support the old infra- structure and specialized skill set. Even if you are willing to pay these 3rd party fees, you will be required to sift through large quantities of irrelevant ESI to find what you need. Tra- ditional restore has no knowledge of the tape content, so they need to restore it all before culling can begin. Automated direct indexing can “cherry pick” specific files and email from tape based on a query and extract them. Traditional re- store moves 100% of the data from tape, while the automated approach extracts what you need, which is typically less than 5% of the total tape contents.
Automated tape discovery today, compared to the lone option of restoration in 2007, has resulted in more than a 90% savings in time. We all know that “Time is Money”. Thus, the impact that this technology has had on the “undue burden” argument, historically used to skirt eDiscovery, has been to render it ineffective.
The Evolution of Tape Discovery
Automated tape discovery solutions deliver direct access to file and email content locked away in proprietary backup formats. No longer do you need to be a restoration specialist with the appropriate software and infrastructure to unlock tape content. Now anyone can perform this process and deliver instant access to relevant data as needed. Tech- nology has not only simplified the discovery process, but has also reduced the time and cost involved as well. Looking at the typical timeframes to access data on tape, the following example shows the dramatic reduction in the time, In this example, the task is to extract ESI from 25 custodians from email data bases backed up on 20 tapes.
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Automated tape discovery today, compared to the lone op- tion of restora- tion in 2007, has resulted in more than a 90% savings in time.
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