Save time and money with automated process to extract relevant ESI from tape.

• Author: McGann, Jim
• Position: TECH TRENDS

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Many organizations have stockpiles of backup tapes. Because they may be mandated to locate and retrieve specific content from these tapes for e-discovery, this poses significant potential financial and liability risks. New technology can automate culling of irrelevant tapes, indexing the remaining ones, and retrieving and archiving only the relevant content, resulting in significant savings.

To safeguard their information, most organizations run a daily * backup process, during which an exact copy of their files and e-mails are written to a number of tapes, which are then stored offsite. Over time, an organization will accumulate significant volumes of these backup tapes. While the bulk of the content on these tapes is no longer of interest, a fraction does have value or poses potential liability, so it is important the organization be able to locate and access that electronically stored information (ESI) when needed, such as for e-discovery.

However, backup tapes are made for bulk protection of data, so they are not designed to make it easy to access specific content on them. Because gaining access to this ESI has been technically difficult, time consuming, and expensive, most legal teams have relied on the "undue burden" argument to avoid collecting and processing it for discovery.

But, new rules and regulations, such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the California Electronic Discovery Act (June 2009), require all ESI to be made accessible and produced to support litigation. As organizations begin to respond to these regulations, they need to understand what their backup tapes contain. This knowledge allows them to extract relevant data into an archive and eliminate future liability posed by data that is locked away on inaccessible tapes.

Considering Remediation

It used to be expensive and difficult to understand the content of old backup tapes because first, the content had to be restored, and then it had to be analyzed to determine what to keep and what to purge. Restoring thousands of tapes was out of the question, so IT departments allowed the mountain of tapes to grow taller, with no end in sight.

However, new technology has solved this problem by eliminating the need for backup restoration and applying a more intelligent approach to the process. This technology scans tapes and then searches and extracts specific files and e-mail without using the original backup software, identifying what is typically only a minute percentage of tape content that will have to be handled.

This means that in significantly less time than was required before, IT can process tapes, find what legal needs, archive it, and make it available. This efficient, cost-effective remediation process enables IT departments to recapture tape storage budgets, while providing legal departments with the necessary data.

Grasping the Backup Process

As data is written to a tape during the backup process, a header is generated, which indicates the specific data contained on the tape. The header of the tape contains metadata, which is defined by the international records management standard, ISO 15489. 1:2001 Information and Documentation--Records Management--Part 1: General, as the data "describing context, content, and structure of records and their management through time."

Tape headers can be quickly scanned to create a...