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Media Restoration/Collection

When faced with pending litigation, the companies involved are legally responsible to provide the opposing party with any information that might be considered relevant or “responsive” to the proceedings of the case. The majority of this data is found in the form of email and files, since they represent a staggering 75% of today’s corporate intelligence (source: ESG). However, the email servers that once housed those documents are not equipped to store them over time, companies often backup their email and document attachments to a form of media such as a backup tape, which they then physically store away until the data may be needed.

Due to the nature of this backup media, organizations have sometimes considered the data on these tapes to be “inaccessible” and therefore not necessarily included as discoverable information. But with discovery rules getting more stringent and case precedent focused on complete discovery, organizations can no longer claim that information on those tapes is inaccessible unless they can prove “undue burden or cost” -- and are therefore responsible to know what is on those tapes and how to produce the data if they are to avoid legal ramifications.

Restoring the data from the backup media is a very expensive and time-consuming process, which is not ideal when a company needs to respond quickly to a legal request. The project becomes a significant burden on the organization’s IT resources, who must recreate the technical environment (including the email system, hardware configuration and backup software) that was used in the backup process in order to even gain access to information on the tapes. If legacy systems were used during that process, the IT department may not possess the capabilities required to restore the data.

Outsourcing the data restoration of backup media to a trusted third party solves a number of problems for the organization - lowering their costs, alleviating the strain on IT resources, and removing the risk that the files that were saved with legacy systems are now inaccessible. In addition, third-party vendors have the technical infrastructure and expertise to scan and inventory the media to create a “catalog” of a tape’s content, enabling customers to pick and choose the files that they want to restore.

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