Compliance Toolkit

Disaster recovery options for legal firm file servers

Tags:
Backup,
Servers,
Legal

Mike Talon Tech Republic

Published: 13 Jun 2005 11:30 BST

No matter if your organisation is a single lawyer working without staff, or a multinational firm with hundreds of employees, law firms of any size and type often run into the same issues when it comes to file servers.

Legal departments and law firms generate documents -- tons of them. There is paperwork that accompanies every step of a legal proceeding, and since every correspondence is part of a case, there are documents and emails to back up the documents. To top it all off, most members of the firm have to be able to search through these records on a moment's notice, leading to all kinds of new issues for disaster recovery (DR) to handle.

Document retention and protection is now a vital part of the regulatory requirements governing publicly traded companies. There's no sense in demanding that all corporate communications be preserved for 10 years if the legal department can't keep their records for more than a few months without data loss.

Put all of these issues together and you end up with some real challenges for DR planning. The first of which would be where you’re going to store all of this backup data. The production servers are going to be bad enough, with gigabyte after gigabyte of file data on server after server in your data centre. Even smaller firms tend to have enormous file servers in their offices, so you’re not exempt just because you’re not a large organisation. You'll need a lot of space for all the production data and even more to back it all up. This equates to either large numbers of backup tapes, or large disk systems for backups, or perhaps both. Since the technology exists to give you either of these types of storage, the major issues here are cost and floor space.

Tape backups
Tapes are a relatively cheap backup solution when compared to other technologies. However, while tapes are cheaper than other systems, the cost adds up quickly when you need a lot of them. You will also require a more sophisticated tape library than a simple single-tape backup hardware tool if you’re going to try to avoid constant swapping of tapes. The bottom line is legal firms require a generous DR budget, even when using the less expensive technologies.