Discoverability of expired tapes?

[Greg Francis <francis () GONZAGA EDU>]

Hello,

I have a question for those out there that may have dealt with this issue.

We have set our tape backups for our Exchange system to expire after 14-days. We keep no archives. This not only saved 
us a significant number of tapes and had negligible impact on our recoverability, but it also reduced our eDiscovery 
issues significantly. BTW, we don't  have a mail archiving solution in place.

What I just discovered in our backup system is that, even though the backups are expiring, until the tapes themselves 
are reused, the backup is still listed. The tapes are all marked as "expired" and are available for reuse but the 
actual session (we use HP Data Protector) doesn't purge from the backup software until all of the tapes for the session 
are used. In reviewing this, I discovered that three backups over the 14-day expiration period still have all of the 
tapes available so I could theoretically recover them if I had the need.

My question is this, since I can recover these backups, are they discoverable even though all of tapes are marked as 
expired?

BTW, I'm looking at ways to purge these sessions once they have expired but we're in a situation where we might not 
want to do that right now.

Thanks,
Greg


Greg Francis
Director, Central Computing and Network Support Services
Gonzaga University