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In what world is two years worth of backups required for reasonable retention? Either the backups are tiny or the company involved has got more money than sense
by ZenoArrow 9y ago
In what world is two years worth of backups required for reasonable retention? Either the backups are tiny or the company involved has got more money than sense. I'd see no reason, in any company, for backups to be held for longer than 6 months, and that would be an outside estimate (many companies could get away with only having a couple of months worth of backups).
- tyfon 9y agoIn Norway you need to keep accounting data for ten years to be compliant with accounting laws so I you lose eight of them you would be in violation. Edit: I see you mean retention, I guess if you discover after a year that your backup routine is malfunctioning and you need older backups but that is not that common I'd guess.
- moviuro 9y agobackups and archive are a different matter. Archives are meant to not be altered; ever (WORM disks[0]). Backups are made to be rewritten, ~~lost~~, or used for restoration. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once_read_many https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once_read_many
- jakozaur 9y agoIf you have a lot of data, keeping backups for too long can be costly. But a lot of datasets are small (e.g. few GB) which makes keeping backups for really long time cheap enough. If you're datastore is small (e.g. SQL table), but supersensitive (E.g. financial data), you may want to keep backups for really long and on medium that doesn't allow easy modifications (e.g. tapes or AWS Glacier). I know some government (e.g. Poland social security) keep several backups in many locations for many years just as a redundancy.