News Release: June 23, 2008

DONNELL SYSTEMS ADVOCATES USING INFORMATION WISELY

“Database archiving is very problematic. Three month, one year, seven year, and twenty year data is intermingled,” he says. “I think people are going to have to stop doing it. You should not back up a database more than three months.”

The habit of backing up the database can lead to at least two kinds of problems – technical and legal.

Technically, for one thing, the software with which the database was archived eventually will be so old that new equipment will not be able to read it.

Even when the database can be read, attempts to retrieve information by replicating the process that created it doesn’t work reliably because of database corrections or other changes over time.

Fixed content information, archived in something like Donnell’s OCIE system, preserves the information – the specific report or document rather than the raw data that went into it – for easy retrieval. That’s also important when the report or document is needed for legal reasons, because the information is now Fixed Content and available only in its original context – not as bits of data in the database.

Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and other privacy laws, as well as lawsuits over employment and products, have brought these issues to the fore, says Bill Adams, Executive Vice President. “You’ve got security and speed hitting against each other.”

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