Email Retention to the Suits

Ever try to explain Email Retention to someone who doesn't really even understand the concept of file backup? With all the new laws, backup options & email retention gadgets, there are a lot of options. The bottom line is I need to make sure the company covers itself the way they want to. That means the owners need to make the decision & live with it. How much insurance do they want to pay for & what type?

The cheapest way is to keep email on backup tapes & over-write them every 2 weeks. Hummer found out that was a problem when they were sued as a Napster investor. The judge ruled that no matter what their written policy, they had an obligation to keep relevant email.

The next cheapest, that I'm trying to avoid at all costs, is keeping the traditional backup of the email system forever. I got burned by that once, learning the hard way that if the data is available, I have to find a way to get it.

An incident occurred at a remote site back in 2000 or so. We had GroupWise 5.1 (I think). The remote site had a couple of PCs. A year later, the site was sold. The GroupWise client was removed, deleting the remote database & the user from our system. The PC went with the site. A couple of years after that, the lawsuit started. A year or so after that, we switched from GroupWise 6.5 to Exchange 2003, getting rid of all of our Novell servers. Another year passed - we're up to 2005 now - I was told to get all emails pertaining to this incident.

Who was involved? 12 peopleSearch terms? 5 different terms were decided on.Number of tapes? 1 for each quarter, but go back to 1998, since we had to prove prior knowledge of conditions, which meant we wound up with 14 tapes all together.

How to actually restore the tapes? Build a Novell server with the proper hardware, restore NDS, install the backup software, GroupWise 6 (I didn't have the correct earlier version, reinstall a later version) & then try to restore some of the users who had left. I got some, since I had their FID & could recreate their user accounts. Others I couldn't. Connect with a workstation with the GroupWise client on it & search. Restore another tape & repeat. I also had to go through everyone's archives. The GroupWise search tool isn't the greatest & the workstation I was using was old & slow. It took me 3 months! I had day to day duties at the same time. Budget season, too. Oh yeah, that email retention policy was a GOOD solution.

Then there are the various devices that save all your email forever. I'll be pushing for one of them, although the cost is going to make them choke. How good will it really be? It will probably take a lawsuit to find out...