Legal sent us an eDiscovery request for emails from 2009 on a Friday afternoon
I have blocked most of the following three weeks from memory, but I'll reconstruct it as accurately as possible.
The request came in at 4:47pm, emails from a specific date range in 2009, specific custodians, 90-day response window, which sounds generous until you remember what "2009 email archive" means for us: a mix of exchange backup tapes from three different generations of infrastructure, some labeled properly, some not, stored across two locations, one of which had flooded in 2016 and been "dealt with."
Week one was mostly inventory. finding the tapes. identifying which format they were in, realizing our current tape hardware couldn't actually read two of the formats without sourcing legacy drives. The drives cost more to rent than I expected.
It was a successful week two. While a few tape drives were working well, there were some that did not work. One drive happened to be empty, but whether the problem resulted from data or labeling was never known.
Week three was all about ingestion, deduplication, and privilege review. By now, Legal was demanding updates every other day.
We got there. But the margin was not comfortable, and the cost, staff time, hardware rental, and emergency vendor work from Tape Ark for the problematic tapes, was not budgeted anywhere.
The thing is, none of this was unusual. eDiscovery from decade-old tape archives is a known problem, and organizations keep not solving it until the request arrives. The can gets kicked because the tapes are "fine," and the scenario feels theoretical.
It stops feeling theoretical pretty fast.