I was reading this article when I came across this curious tid bit:
Think I'm exaggerating? Just ask Morgan Stanley, who up until the mid 00's used their backups as archives. The SEC asked them for a bunch of emails, and their inability to retrieve those emails resulted in a $15M fine. They also had a little over 1400 backup tapes that they needed months of time to be able to pull emails off of to satisfy an electronic discovery request from a major lawsuit from Coleman Holdings in 2005. (They needed this time because they stored the data via backup software, not archive software.) The judge said "archive searches are quick and inexpensive. They do not cost 'hundred of thousands of dollars' or 'take several months.'" (He obviously had never tried to retrieve emails off of backup tapes.) He issued an adverse inference instruction to the jury that said that this was a ploy by Morgan Stanley to hide emails, and that they should take that into consideration in the verdict. They did, and Morgan Stanley lost the case and Coleman Holdings was given a $1.57B judgment.
So what's the difference between "Archive Software" and "Backup Software" and why are archive searches quick and inexpensive? Was the judge right about this, or just confused?