Preservation and records management are some of the key processes on the left-hand side of the EDRM lifecycle. There are plenty of systems that strongly support this article’s description of the preservation problem in many of today’s legacy email archiving installations. “[1] Email Archives, Are they an Email Roach Motel?”  nails the underlying business assumptions in place at the time that the systems were built and installed: storage was expensive, data was very duplicative, and storage subsystems were unable to read and write data efficiently. Since document fidelity (how well did the system preserve the look, feel, metadat, and content of the original document) was not a driving force in the design of those early systems, many practitioners will find no shortage of issues, technicalities, defects, and other loopholes to deflate the confidence in the validity, comprehensiveness, and defensibility of data extracted from archiving systems.

These technical “sucker punches” will force many corporations to go back to their backup tapes and forensic collection techniques, further draining away the cost-savings that those corporations had hoped to gain by implementing these systems in the first place.