cellocgw wrote:Company lawyers who love paranoia usually force implementation of all sorts of minimum and maximum rentention dates. Apparently they have no concept of server backups.
The last place where I was at where this mattered, policy was to keep
everything1 forever2. I'm not sure if we had lawyers involved in that, though. We were mostly striving (as the technical department) to do best-of-best practice (or "best effort", which seemed to satisfy most people most of the time, allowing for glitches) and I tried to stay away from the parts where we might have been expected to justify the expense.
But, back to the point, the whole industry I was in was (
supposedly) geared towards having Too Much Information, securely in private, even if just the bare minimum was allowed out to the public side (which was mostly the client, and only then filtered to the regulators, and only much filtered towards 'real' public). Never saw a lawyer involved, before I left.
After I left (and after the obligatory lawyer that I got to witness my NDA) some (unrelated!) company business
definitely required lawyers, and I know for sure that all relevent backups and archives were likely trawled through for possible disclosure, because I had a hand in the document that dealt with (the technical side of) that necessary response. I wonder how well it actually worked, behind the scenes?
1 Related to core business. Which technically meant that casual emails were covered in backups alongside work ones, assuming not deleted before the next server backup cycle, and maybe if roaming profiles put personalised desktop elements onto the network server.
2 Or best ability. Backup refreshing onto new backup media was a developing art, and the monthly off-site backup DLT from June 1991 (say) might have degraded before it was eventually cycled back a decade or so later in order to burn it (and several other vintage archives) onto a triple-set of DVD-Rs intended to be stored avain offsite/othersite/locally for no more than five more years before then being checked and used to recompile into the Next Big Thing in the armoury (Blu-ray?)…