Data retention? Don't you mean backup?

Archiving remains misunderstood and inefficient, according to a new study.

Commissioned by BridgeHead Software, a company that sells storage management software, the report found that a small minority of respondents are archiving because of legal mandates, while many say that legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOXA) is not affecting their business.

This may well be because privately held companies are not subject to the Act, which requires data to be stored for lengthy periods of time.

It's also the case that corporate legal teams, who could be expected to drive compliance within a corporation, are likely to take a pessimistic view and insist on complete adherence to the letter of the law. Business and IT managers a more pragmatic bunch -- explaining why the survey found disaster recovery was a more important driver for archiving than legal compliance.

Yet, according to Bridgehead, a large portion of U.S. companies may be jeopardizing their business operations by failing to archive properly while remaining complacent about regulatory compliancy and confusing the functions of backup and archiving.

Almost a quarter of respondents (23 percent) said they do not archive data. As a result, the hypothetical task of retrieving a vital file from three months ago would be hit-or-miss: 20 percent of all respondents do not know how long such a file would take to retrieve, 10 percent say more than a day, two percent say more than a week, and six percent said that they simply would not be able to find it.

However, 77 percent of respondents claim to archive data to some extent, 74 percent say their organization has a file archive solution and 66 percent have an e-mail archive.

Solutions for hierarchical storage management, storage resource management and information lifecycle management are all only possessed by 10 percent though.

Manual archiving dominates -- 29 percent -- with 32 percent archiving automatically with archive software and four percent archive manually using archive software. However, a remarkable 35 percent claim to archive manually using backup software -- what Bridgehead calls "an entirely inappropriate tool for tracking file-level data over long time periods and a