Many of us are familiar with the term “ROT”, but Brendan Sullivan of S2|DATA says the “R” in ROT should be redefined!
As Brendan reminds us in his blog post here, within the realm of Information Governance, the term ROT data is generally accepted as an acronym for “Redundant Obsolete & Trivial” data. Records managers would seek to remediate such ROT data, presumably as a cost saving in storage or the management of such data.
Redundant is the operative word in this acronym because there are duplicate versions of the same data. Horrifying, right? Well, as Brendan notes, “not really”.
As he states: “A lot has changed over the past 15 years in the data storage world, so much so that we’d argue the word redundant doesn’t justify any action. Back in the day, backups might have been daily, weekly, or monthly. Full backups would quickly create hundreds of instances of the same data in a matter of just a few years. Differential, incremental, or synthetic full backups dropped the redundancy significantly, followed by the use of single instance ‘on-the-fly’ de-duplication applications and appliances for email archives.”
In fact, before there was the cloud, “big data storage” was tape, which (as Brendan notes) “I strongly suspect many of the big clouds back up to.” So do I. He also says this: “The latest LTO-9 stores 30 TB and costs roughly $100 meaning that for a dollar you are storing 300 GB! Does anybody care about redundant data at these cost levels for storage?”
Good question. Here’s even a better question: What does Brendan say the “R” in ROT should be redefined to? Find out here – it’s only one click! Failing to do so could be risky! 😉
So, what do you think? Should the “R” in ROT be changed? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image created using OpenArt, using the term “robot IT person working in a data center with tape drives”.
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