T 2.75 Inadequate capacity of archival storage media

An inadequate assessment of the data volume during archiving may result in the use of archiving media that are too small, causing incomplete or delayed archiving.

When assessing the required data volume, the expected maximum size of the documents to be stored is often the only influencing factor the assessment is based on. However, the memory space actually required for archive systems may be a multiple of the aforementioned, since the type of data storage and the change frequency of documents are essential influencing factors in this connection.

When archiving on WORM media (Write Once Read Multiple) for example, the documents are inevitably stored in several versions, i.e. a new document is stored after each change. This way, high data volumes may be generated even for small documents with high change frequencies. Old versions of the documents cannot be subsequently deleted from the archiving medium any more. Along with capacity bottlenecks, this may also cause data protection or confidentiality issues, since data is only identified as "to be deleted", but is not actually deleted.