Chapter 1

What Is Archiving?
Why Should I Care?
In this chapter
▶ Knowing why archiving is necessary
▶ Seeing what’s different about backup
▶ Looking at the advantages
▶ Understanding archiving and SharePoint

W hen you think of the word archiving several things

may come to mind. Maybe the dusty backroom of a
library, with shelves of boxes and books stacked to the ceil-
ing. Or maybe you picture the dark basement of a museum,
where all sorts of strange and scary things are covered with
tattered canvas tarps. Well, you’d be right. That’s what
archiving has traditionally involved — it’s the practice of stor-
ing away potentially interesting, useful, and unique items that
may never see the light of day, but must be kept nonetheless.

Understanding the Importance

of Archiving
So what does archiving have to do with you? Why should you,
as the member of an IT team, an HR team, a Legal team of a
large, modern organization, care? You don’t have any ancient
skulls or the Dead Sea Scrolls to protect.

Although you might not be holding onto anything as impor-

tant to humanity as the missing link in the genetic trail of
humankind or some long-lost biblical chapters, you know you

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 6 Part I: Archiving and SharePoint

need to care about the intellectual property that allows your

company to function, thrive, and compete. When you think
about it, whether you’re involved in producing widgets or
selling powerful ideas and unique know-how, your company’s
greatest asset is the ephemeral stuff that sits in its collective
brain. Some of those ideas have made it out onto paper, and
in this day and age, onto a hard drive, a file share, an email
thread, or a document management system. Tracking and
storing that information for later use is important to you and
your company.

Just how important is it? Think back to that time when your
hard drive crashed. Maybe you were lucky enough to have
a backup of all your photos, documents, email, and account
information. Maybe you weren’t that lucky, but you paid some
guy a couple hundred bucks to recover your information
and burn it to a DVD. Sure, this is personal stuff we’re talk-
ing about, but the example illustrates how important it is to
be prepared for disasters. Relating back to your professional
career and your current position within your company, you
may start to realize too that there’s more to just having a
backup or someone that you can call when disaster strikes.

If you’re an attorney at a large organization, you know that if

your CEO receives a subpoena to testify in a case, he’s going
to come to your office asking for help. Hopefully you can find
all the information that you need, but if you can’t, who do you
turn to? Yes, your IT department. They have backups, they
can find information from eight years ago. But your IT depart-
ment may not have the time to go digging through hundreds,
if not thousands, of backup tapes looking for a few documents
related to the case, so they’ll bring in outside help to hope-
fully locate what you’re looking for. Sound expensive? It can
be, and usually is.

Now, take another minute to imagine a different scenario. One

in which querying for information that’s more than a decade
old takes only a few seconds. Having a single, reliable, and
centralized source of all information related to your business
operations. Having established policies for how long data
should remain in the system, and being able to set expiration
policies on types of information that can safely be destroyed.
What about that file that someone deleted and nobody else
seems to have a copy of — do you have a way of getting that
single file back without restoring an entire quarter’s worth

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 Chapter 1: What Is Archiving? Why Should I Care? 7
of data to a temporary location and then searching through
them one-by-one? Now you’re starting to get the picture of
what archiving is and why you should care about it.

Backup versus Archiving

To the casual observer, archiving data is the same as backing
it up. But is it really? Backups are important to your business
in the event that something catastrophic happens to one or
more of your servers. Backup strategies are shaped by busi-
ness needs, such as how fast a replacement server must be
brought back online, whether the information being backed
up is irreplaceable or critical to business operations, and
whether the data needs to be stored offsite in a highly secure
place.

For archiving, these backup criteria are much less important

because recovering a single item, a collection of items match-
ing some search criteria, or even an entire file share is at your
fingertips. You can think of archiving as a living repository
of data and a place from which information can be retrieved
on an ad-hoc basis. Archives aren’t meant to be taken offline.
However, because you have all your information in a single
repository, backing up that data is that much easier.

Advantages of Archiving
Archiving enables businesses to have more control over their
data and to do more with information in their organization,
including:

✓ Better managing storage requirements

✓ Enabling employees to find relevant information quickly
in response to internal and external requests
✓ Enforcing business policies, including government regu-
latory compliance

At a high level, these capabilities may seem trivial and some-

thing you think you already have in place. The following sec-
tions take a closer look at what each one of these capabilities
means.

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 8 Part I: Archiving and SharePoint

Better manage storage

requirements
The ratio between hard disk size and cost seems to be get-
ting better and better, so why is it that year-over-year your
storage costs keep growing? That doesn’t make any sense.
Of course you know the answer, either by the investigation
you’ve done or just your own intuition: there are more and
more documents, email, videos, pictures, case files, and the
like every year, and that upward trend of information stored
on local or network drives just keeps chugging along. What if
you could flatten that line out so you didn’t have to go to the
CEO requesting another NAS or SAN at the next annual budget
meeting?

Archiving can drastically reduce both the amount of data

that you’re physically storing for your company’s operations,
and a good archiving product stores the bulk of the files,
especially the larger ones, on inexpensive drives. Look for
archiving solutions that leverage Tier 1 SQL server storage for
tracking and indexing, and leverage cheaper storage for the
other 99 percent of your company’s storage needs.

Enable employees to find and

recover information
If you’re an IT person, how much of your time do you spend
finding a document or email that someone deleted? How much
of your time do you think you’d regain if you allowed them to
find that information on their own? With email it’s easier to do
this than with other information types and locations because
a person’s inbox is their inbox, but with file shares and docu-
ment management systems, you may still be able to let Adam
in Accounting locate last year’s numbers (for the fifth time) by
himself.

More often than not, you’re going to let certain people have
access to the archive as it pertains to their job, such as Larry
from Legal who usually needs to find information in response
to potential litigation.

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 Chapter 1: What Is Archiving? Why Should I Care? 9
Enforce business policies
When someone from the HR department requests data on
a particular topic or perhaps even an employee, or when
someone from Legal asks you if corporate data is being stored
according to some industry regulation, what is your immedi-
ate reaction? A request or question like this brings up many
other questions, such as:

✓ What type of data is involved? Is it everything from

memos to email?
✓ How far back can I reasonably retrieve information? Is
there a statute on how long information has to be kept?
✓ How many different places do I have to look to find that
information?
✓ How long do I estimate it will take to deliver results?
✓ What policies, from internal to external, from written to
unspoken, should I be aware of before I start my search?

You can see that there’s a lot more to responding to a request

or adhering to the letter or even the intent of the law than is
immediately clear. More often than not, you have to do a little
research and figure out answers to these questions before
you can respond to the request. Sometimes this involves a
lot of extra time that you didn’t budget for in your long list
of responsibilities. By having a system that enforces policies
and returns only relevant information, you can spend more of
your time doing your real job.

Archiving and SharePoint

Because this book is about SharePoint Archiving, you might
wonder how all of this archiving talk relates to how your com-
pany is using SharePoint today or plans to use SharePoint in
the future.

From purely a sales perspective, SharePoint is a phenomenal

product. That’s not to say it’s not a phenomenal product in
other respects. When you think Microsoft, you think Windows

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 10 Part I: Archiving and SharePoint

and Office. Historically they are the two, big, money-making

products that Microsoft has relied on to deliver value to its
shareholders. Although SharePoint is technically part of the
Office team, it’s also a whole product on its own, and it’s one
of the Microsoft business units (also called product lines),
that have also reached the so-called Billion Dollar Club. This
means that SharePoint is quickly becoming the de-facto stan-
dard for companies of any size, especially those who are heav-
ily invested in the Microsoft platform. Users find SharePoint
easy to use for many reasons. Some of these include:

✓ Great integration with the Office suite of programs

✓ Easy-to-use, intuitive interface for sharing content and
building sites
✓ Metadata capture on documents for powerful classifica-
tion and search
✓ Basic workflow capabilities to gather feedback or send a
document for approval

Controlling the wild-fire spread of SharePoint is what people

in the business call SharePoint governance, but trying to
govern something that is already out of control can prove to
be tricky. It’s like trying to fight a 6,000 acre fire that started
as a controlled burn on a few acres when a warm summer
breeze turned into a dry, gusty wind storm. You’re not going
to get control over it until you get some rain. The same thing
goes for SharePoint. You won’t get control over it until you
limit the number of sites people are creating and put some
policies in place for when content and sites get deleted, what
type of content goes where, and train your users to describe
the information they’re creating and uploading to SharePoint.

Keep this uncontrolled aspect of SharePoint in mind for two

important reasons:

✓ Controlling how users manage their content can be elu-

sive, even with a mature product installed on a server
that IT owns.
✓ Planning the how, who, where, and why (and even the
what) before rolling out SharePoint in your organization
will help you keep that controlled burn from turning into
a raging inferno.

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