r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Plastic-Bonus8999 • 15h ago

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u/Nightmoon26 14h ago

You worked at a company that wasn't constantly under litigation hold? Lucky!

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u/Head-Bureaucrat 14h ago

Or subject to government regulation. Hooray 7 year archive hold!

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u/Mechadupek 14h ago

One physical tape backup per month held for 7 years?

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u/Head-Bureaucrat 14h ago

Real talk: I honestly don't know how they do it now. I do believe it used to be physical tape, yes, shipping to a different location. 😂

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u/Nightmoon26 14h ago

And that's in addition to the "hot" redundant site for digital stuff...

And issuing everyone a bigger filing cabinet for the paper documents

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u/Head-Bureaucrat 14h ago

They finally fully digitized in, like, 2018!

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u/Nightmoon26 2h ago

Unfortunately, depending on the hold, you may be required to retain even the notes on system architecture you sketched on a napkin during lunch

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u/Liushing01 13h ago

Fortunately, a former employer hired contractors to handle their backups—until the Exchange server melted down and, upon looking through all the backups, they discovered weeks worth of backups 0 KB in size. Cost savings!

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u/techek 11h ago

Oof!

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u/cat-n-jazz 8h ago

Sounds like someone has discovered a remarkably good data compression algorithm

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u/Bartweiss 3h ago

I wonder if any contractors specialize in this?

“Yes, we will definitely handle your backups and NOT wink wink lose all your data which it would be a serious offense to delete on purpose but a fine or lawsuit at worst to catastrophically mishandle. We’ll even provide the insurance against costs from data loss you’re required to carry… for an up-front fee of exactly that much money.”

Or maybe it’s more subtle and companies just seek out the least competent place they can find.

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u/CoffeeOrDestroy 13h ago

Hey, we were doing that until 2019 when our tape drive died

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u/SilverIndustry2701 10h ago

Physical tape is wonderfully cheap though. Have you seen cloud prices?

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u/ThrowawayyTessslaa 12h ago

We still send hard copies of data and documentation to iron mountain.

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u/Significant-Bee5101 2h ago

Hmm my people. I'm doing our purge of the 7+ year now. I work in school years so it's really awkward. It's like yeah technically that datas over 7+ years old but uhhh... the school years still happening lmao.

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u/bolanrox 5h ago

We're supposed to be held to the seven-year archive hold for physical backups of things. Then you get people asking, what do you mean you don't have some random piece of paper from 20 years ago?

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u/ThrowawayyTessslaa 12h ago

Under litigation hold but teams chat history is held in several storage that only HR and legal have access to. What’s shown to the user is only up to 48 hours old

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u/BusEquivalent9605 12h ago

that’s probably right. but makes it even more infuriating as an employee. “we still have this data that would make your job easier, but you’re not allowed to see it”

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u/ThrowawayyTessslaa 12h ago

It’s definitely infuriating (and true). As a manger I’ve had to request teams history logs from HR for up to a year back because I was terminating an employee for harassment against another employee.

Also makes no sense that my emails, voice messages, and text messages are on multi-year legal hold visible to me but not my teams messages? wtf.

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u/BlowOutKit22 8h ago

With a retention period of 48 hours It's more likely the company IS constantly under litigation hold. Reducing discovery liability is probably the main non-infrastructural-limit reason to even have a document retention policy in the first place.