by Samuel A. Fineberg, Co-chair, SNIA LTR TWG
Ten years ago, a SNIA Task Force undertook a 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey with a goal to determine requirements for long-term digital retention in the data center. The Task Force hypothesized that the practitioner survey respondents would have experiences with terabyte archive systems that would be adequate to define business and operating system requirements for petabyte-sized information repositories in the data center.
Time flies while you’re having fun. Now it’s 2017, and the SNIA Long-Term Retention Technical Working Group (LTR TWG) and the SNIA Data Protection & Capacity Optimization Committee have teamed up to launch the 2017 SNIA Archive Survey.
Back in the “first” decade of the 21st century, practitioners struggled with logical and physical retention, but for the most part generally understood their problems. Eighty percent of organizations participating in the 2007 survey had a need to retain information over 50 years, while 68% reported a need of over 100 years. However, “long term” realistically extended to only about 2017-2022 to migrate and retain readability. After that, survey responders felt that processes would fail and/or become too costly under an expected avalanche of information.
Fast forward to 2017 and new standards, storage formats, and software are in play; and markets like cloud services offer choices which did not exist 10 years ago. 
Migration and retention solutions are becoming available but these solutions are not widely used, except in government agencies, libraries, and highly regulated industries. Understanding what is needed and why is a focus of SNIA’s new survey.
The 2017 survey seeks to assess who needs to retain long term information and what information needs to be retained, with appropriate policies. The focus will now be on IT best practices, not just business requirements. How is long term information stored, secured, and preserved? Does the cloud impact long term retention requirements?
SNIA’s 2017 Archive Survey launched at September 2017 Storage Developer Conference. We’re sending out the call. Are you a member of an IT staff associated with archives? In Records and Information Management (RIM)? 
An academic? In Legal or Finance? If long term data preservation is near and dear to your heart, you’ll want to take the survey, which covers business drivers, policies, storage, practices, preservation, security, and more. Help SNIA understand how archive practices have evolved in the last 10 years, what changes have taken place in corporate practices, and what technology changes have impacted daily operations.
Take the survey and join us at Storage Visions in Milpitas CA on October 16, 2017 where we’ll be discussing SNIA’s work in long term retention and data protection. Finally, stay tuned – we’ll be publishing our results in early 2018!