Backup Retention Policies

I am pretty much writing this to vent a little bit. Apparently my company is going through some litigation and since I am the backup admin I have been asked to recover a number of emails going back to 2003 for employees that no longer work for us.

At my last company they had a pretty cool email retention policy. They didn't keep emails older than six months, and they did not allow PST archives. They put that out because of the Microsoft anti-trust suit a few years back where Microsoft was subpoenaed for their old emails, and had them used against them in the suit. Some damning emails from top level executives surfaced saying how they were going to crush the competition, and they were going to drive them out of business. You know stuff like that.

By only retaining emails for 6 months, when you get subpoenaed, you can simply say that your policy is not to keep emails older than 6 months. It makes things easier from sysadmin standpoint, and it makes things easier for a legal standpoint.

Well my current company's policy isn't that. We have a much broader retention policy, so now I am stuck going through our tape inventory at our off site holding facilities trying to figure out what we have. This isn't going to be pretty ladies and gentlemen!

What kind of retention policy do you have? Have you ever had to do something similar? Let me know in the comments. I am curious as all hell.

Posted in: backup policy, backup retention