Archiving, the practice of storing data for a period greater than one year, is necessary for your business' health, as well as essential for legal reasons.

Think of archiving for additional data protection in the same way as saving tax records, only even more important. Because of the importance of this program, don't be fooled into thinking that normal backup gives you all the secure archive media you need. You need long-term archived media in addition to routine backup.

Archive tapes are generated weekly, monthly, or quarterly. In addition, a yearly archive tape is essential. Generally a set of archive tapes is generated to coincide with month-end, quarter-end and year-end financial activities.

An absolute must for archive/long-term data storage tapes is to create a duplicate data set on separate media. Due to the academic, historical, financial or legal (especially the legal) reasons for which data is archived, you cannot risk the vulnerability of one set alone. Mishandling, natural disaster, inappropriate environmental conditions or misplacement of a single copy of your archive data could put your or your company in legal jeopardy. Furthermore, multiple copies of the same data set should not be stored in the same geographic location. (See:" importance of offsite storage" for more details)