The point about “backup is for recovery, archiving is for discovery” is not that backups can’t be discovered. It is that discovery using backups is hugely painful, time-consuming and expensive and that active archiving is much cheaper and faster. In Toussie vs. County of Suffolk, where the county tried to argue it was too expensive for it to do discovery on backups of its email systems, the final cost was $1000-$2000 per tape — for 470 tapes.

The net: if you have an active archive, your information is accessible and discovery is vastly cheaper. I work for Symantec, and our customers have seen 90-95% cost reductions in eDiscovery cost using Enterprise Vault.

In the Federal Rules Of Civil Procedure, there’s the concept of “accessible”. If you have a searchable archive, then that meets the definition of “accessible” and you do not need to do discovery against backup tapes — they become “inaccessible”. Without an archive, backup tapes become “accessible” because there’s no choice — it’s the only place where the information resides. As the judge wrote in his opinion on the Toussie case “information management policies are not a dark or novel art.”

Happy New Year,

Mathew