“What can’t be measured, can’t be managed.”
Peter Drucker, Management Consultant”
One problem we frequently encounter when talking to new clients about their file and email archiving solution is that they don’t know exactly what data they are storing. If you don’t know what data you’ve got, how can you manage it?
In most businesses, it isn’t the people who create the files and emails who are responsible for file and email archiving. Generally, we find the IT team is tasked with storing data from across the business without being given much detail on what’s valuable and what isn’t. Added to that is the frustration associated with not knowing how much data is duplicated, how many times it’s duplicated, and how old it is. It isn’t uncommon for an established business to regularly back up decade-old data that is no longer of use. It’s a waste of time and resources.
That’s why we engineered our file and email archiving solution to give businesses better visibility of what they are storing and what kinds of data make up the bulk of their archive.
Measure your data
ShareArchiver has a feature that can identify duplicates and remove the copies. In some clients we find up to 25-40% of their data storage volume consists of duplicates. Clearing out the spare copies can make a huge difference to how much data they need to store.
If you haven’t already done so, we suggest you use ShareArchiver’s reporting tools to assess the extent of your file and email archiving problem. Our solution will automatically only store one copy of the data, with any duplicate copies being replaced with a link to the original version. This significantly cuts down on your storage requirements while data remains accessible.
To help you understand what data you’re keeping, ShareArchiver lets you archive data according to properties including its size or file type, the date it was created or last modified. ShareArchiver’s file archiving reporting features then helps you understand the properties of data making up your archive and what kind of data is occupying most space.
Our clients rely on the graphical interface to understand how their data is divided amongst different types of files and how it is split by age/volume. You can measure how much data storage you are saving by using ShareArchiver to compress your archive and de-duplicated.
Manage your data
Once you’ve archived the bulk of your data, you can set up some file archiving rules for the future based on policies such as age or size of data being retained. Our clients find this helps them stay in control of their file and email archiving and they can say with confidence what kind of data is being archived. The key to taking control of your data really is to understand it.
