@34162 It depends; there are no easy answers to this. There are a
number of initiatives that a company should undertake, including
disaster recovery, business continuity
planning, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)
compliance and data security -- these are
all exercises that force you to examine your data. The retention
of data is based on the value of the data to the company and
related legal implications or compliance requirements. Many
companies are spending a lot of money on these exercises, and it
would be wise to add the consideration of retention to any data
management initiative.
Of course, there are practical limits on what you can do. A file
server or email server can be quite challenging when we have
terabytes of unstructured data, so it may be
impossible to evaluate every single file. Many companies adopt a
global approach and archive large quantities of data. But, even
when a company has trouble looking at older data, strong
policies are needed for record creation going forward. You may
not be able to fix what happened in the past, but it's still
important to make corrections so that you don't keep repeating
the same mistakes. Don't push off the problem.
Listen to the
Unstructured data FAQ audiocast.
Go to the beginning of the
Unstructured Data FAQ Guide.