How long do you keep your backups
Backup retention periods seem to be driven by urban myths and how systems worked in the 1970s. Not wholly surprising since most back up software still seems to be stuck in that period and most sales pitches are urban myths. So how long do you keep backups for (this is the easy starter question) 10 years, 7 years or even forever? Do you keep you daily backups for that long or only your monthly or yearly ones? Why (don’t you just hate it when someone says why) have you chosen that time period? Was it because someone in the business said there was a law that said they had to keep some data for that time? What happens to stuff that was created and then deleted between your backups tapes? Have they ever shown you the law that states that? My first question is where is the data kept? Most HR/finance/legal systems likely to have a data retention requirement store data in a database these days and the data covers the last seven years or whatever is the legal requirement or for w...