About Long Term Data Retention
Many organizations have a requirement to preserve large volumes of digital content indefinitely into the future, and to maintain access for reasons such as medical treatment decisions, retention of intellectual property, and appreciation of cultural and scientific history.
The SNIA has a Long Term Retention technical working group focused on the technical challenges of long term digital information retention and preservation, namely both physical ("bit") and logical preservation. This group will generate reference architectures, create new technical definitions for formats, interfaces and services, and author educational materials and will be working to ensure that digital information can be efficiently and effectively preserved for many decades, even when devices are constantly being replaced, new technologies, applications and formats are introduced, consumers (designated communities) often change.
Based on the work done by SNIA’s 100 Year Archive Task Force, we need to make another very important point about the operational challenges of long-term digital information retention. We are experiencing extraordinary changes in the industry driven by factors such as regulatory compliance and legal and security risks. The survey confirms that retention periods are increasing. What is the impact? Here is an example. In most organizations e-mail has turned into a vital business record and individual e-mail messages are now the target for legal discovery.
Latest Publications, Tutorials
-
Retaining Information for 100 years
This session will focus on the most important questions in long-term digital preservation and will demonstrate why it is still so difficult.
We will propose how the storage industry can help its customers preserve and use their digital content over the lifetimes that they expect from past experience with physical and analog assets, lifetimes that can greatly exceed those of any single digital storage device or storage technology. -
Solving the Coming Archive Crisis - the 100 Year Dilemma
This presentation will discuss the following:
- Best practices for long term digital information retention based on the work of the 100 Year Archive Task Force
- New technologies you can deploy that will help such as de-duplication and CAS
- Future technologies and solutions that we can expect -
100 Year Archive Requirements Survey
In September 2006, the SNIAs 100 Year Archive Task Force decided it needed a clear statement of business requirements to frame and bound potential technology solutions to the long-term digital information retention challenges of the data center.
The plan was to design and conduct an online survey inviting a broad range of information owning and administrating professionals world- wide to participate and provide guidance. -
The Coming Archive Crisis
In summary, long term digital information retention is approaching a crisis. We are talking about the amalgamation and collection of information for which businesses and organizations are being held legally accountable.
Is it not correct that the "archival" problem has expanded beyond the notion of "retaining records," to retaining "all relevant digital information" that is important to the business for periods of time specific to that informations lifecycle?
