Archiving systems are essential to ensure that valuable data is preserved. A wide variety of technologies exist, but tape medium remains the popular choice for data back-up due to its low cost and large capacity for data storage.

A recent survey by my company, C2C Systems, and Osterman Research Inc. found that the primary archiving method for 77% of surveyed companies is backing up to tape, with 49% keeping tapes for 90 days or less and 28% keeping some critical data long term. And according to IDC market research, tape automation is a $2.03 billion industry -- and the primary storage media for corporate data that needs to be duplicated, stored and available for restores.

Tape, however, is not always the best choice for archiving email. First, there's the sheer quantity of data. According to The Radicati Group, a market research firm headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, a typical email account sends/receives about 9.6MB of data per day, which quickly adds up to 192GB of data per month for a 1,000-user company. "We see 10,000 messages a day, 40,000 messages a week," says Kenneth Adams, CIO at Miles & Stockbridge, a regional law firm of 160 lawyers in Maryland and Virginia.

Then there are regulatory compliance considerations. An investment firm, for example, would have to make sure that their data and critical financial files are not only secure, but immediately available for any National Association of Securities Dealers or Securities Exchange Commission request.

"Manually reviewing the hundreds of thousands of email messages would take hundreds of man hours in review, capture and dissemination," says Alex Shohet, Partner/Founder of Sandbox Technologies, LLC, a technical consulting services firm in the Los Angeles area.

Osterman Research, a market research firm that helps organizations understand the markets for messaging, directory and related products and services, found that many companies are having to do just that. A September 2003 survey revealed that 81% of IT departments have been required to search through back-up tapes to retrieve one or more emails in response to a request from users or others during the past three years.

Total recall
Companies are quickly realizing that tape back-up is just copying information away -- that is, making copies and sticking them somewhere. There's no way to find the information when you need it most and what you've saved may be useless for company knowledge purposes. Tape back-up is notoriously unreliable; once data is written to tape, there is no assurance that it is complete or accurate. And who knows if you've backed up the right data? The tape could have your company's crucial business information or a sales person's five-year store of email jokes and cartoons.