A blog post written by Jim McGann of Index Engines on May 4^th zeroed in on an interesting topic; how to keep ESI skeletons out of your corporate closet.

In his post Jim writes: Law firms and corporations alike tend to keep data storage devices well beyond what their compliance requirements or business needs actually dictate.  These so-called “skeletons in the closet” pose a major problem when the entity gets sued or subpoenaed. All that dusty data is suddenly potentially discoverable. Legal counsel can be proactive and initiate responsible handling of this legacy data by defining a new, defensible information governance process.

These skeletons can encompass both old, out of date data as well as the devices the old data is stored on. The risk includes not just the old data that might have content that you would rather not have discovered but also the storage devices that would “read” the old data. An attorney friend of mine related a case he was involved in several years ago where a company in discovery was asked about a filing cabinet in their warehouse that contained hundreds of 8 inch floppy disks. The plaintiff’s attorney asked if those floppy disks could contain data from the time period in question (8 years ago). No one at the company could really answer the question so the plaintiff’s attorney asked for an inventory of the data on those 8 inch floppy disks.

The defendants counsel obviously raised concerns over their ability to actually read the data as well as the cost involved. They argued that the disks drives which could read the 8 inch floppy disks couldn’t be found, that even if they could find the drives, they didn’t have computers with the correct interface to actually look at the data and the software to enable the floppy disks to be read did not exist.

The Judges question to the defendants was obvious; “why do you have a filing cabinet full of hundreds of 8 inch floppy disks if they can’t be read?”

The point of the story is data/information has a life span. 8,9,10 year old data in most cases will not be useful to an organization (unless there are regulatory reasons to keep it) so manage it for as long as its useful to your organization then get rid of it, especially if the technology to utilize it is way out of date.