Once again, terminologies divide RIM and IT on Information Management

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, once again we see the serious lack of understanding of what the profession charged with the responsibilty of managing an organization's information assets (RIM, Records and Information Management)  expects from the individuals charged with providing the technology and services (IT/IS, Information Technology and Systems).

This article started out on the right track, in fact, it was bringing tears to my eyes... =)   as it clearly stated: 

"Backup and archiving are different The first step in moving to a new system is to understand the difference between backup and archive. Backups are copies of active production information used when a problem arises within a production environment, and a recovery copy is needed to get the business up and running. Since backups are focused on constantly changing business information, a newer and known good copy is always preferred to an older copy, so backups are generally short-term and often overwritten."

But here's where we parted views:

"Archives are not copies of production data, but rather the primary version of a piece of often inactive or nonchanging data. In fact, when data stops changing or is no longer frequently used, it is often best to move it to an archive, where it lives outside the backup window and can still be accessed."

Archived data (by the RIM definition) is no longer active, but shouldn't be moved "outside of the backup window" as long as it hasn't met it's scheduled retention requirement! Until that time, which could be 2, 6, 25, or as long as 75 years it STILL needs to be backed up and additionally, it needs to be converted and migrated to ensure accessibility for the entire life cycle of the information.

The biggest problem I have with the focus of this article is its making assumptions based primarily on cost, not on business needs for access to the information. Cost of ownership and operation need to be considered, but organizations need to look at the their policies and practices for managing information first to ensure they are managing the RIGHT information for the RIGHT periods of time, then determine if there are more cost effective technologies that would help then achieve this. By doing this, they may be abele to reduce the volume of information being retained and eliminate some of the need to look at more "creative methods" of storage.

The decisions to change technologies shouldn't be coming from the service providers (IT), they should be coming from the information asset managers (RIM).  There may be business needs related to accessing the information that haven't been considered.  One of the last things involved in a records management strategy is access patterns.  It's not at all uncommon for a series of records that hasn't been touched for 2-3, or even more years to suddenly rise to top in importance... and if it's been moved to an "archive" and isn't in the backup window any longer, how do you know if it will be accessible?