Alfresco Data Archiving

[subwiz]

Our audit department requires us to archive every data uploaded to Alfresco. Even when a space is deleted, a file is overwritten or deleted: we should be able to revert to old content. We are expected to maintain 10 years history of every document uploaded. How do we design this? Or, does Alfresco already have any archiving solution?

[norgan]

Hi,
that sounds like you need to overwrite or block the "empty trash" functions as well as any copy, rename & move operation in the client. You do realize however, that this also includes any restructuring ? Just imagine, in 3 years, you decide to reorg your top-level-folderstructure, forcing you to move all second-level-folders. it might just happen, that a simple accidental "copy" of the top folder might double your amount of "really stored data" within the day … doubling your backup time as well.

I would suggst a different approach
a) Do a monthly full backup, which is kept for 10 years. Remove all content, that is deleted, after the montly full backup. If needs be, keep a protocol of all deletions.
b) or do an export (moving the stuff) of content to an archive system, pushing the content, audittrails, access logs and deletion logs over there. Inplement a retrival strategy to access content, when it is stored in the "offline archive", meaning tape drives in a juke box or similar stuff.

You just have to make sure that the version system and the CIFS/webdav interfaces do work as well with this AND make the audit department confirm in detail, which type of information needs to be in which kind of access - and make them pay the storage bill

I hope that helped a bit.

Norgan

P.S. When you designed an offline-storage export/retrival, remember to give it to the opensource community

[itsard]

Hi,
If I am using the SOAP webservice apis to create,operate or access the documents of alfresco, how do I archive them from apis.
I dont use the web client  and have integrated alfresco DMS with my system through webservice apis. When my user wishes to archive the documents, how do i let that happen in Alfresco?
Regards,

[norgan]

Hi itsard,
there is no "archive" function in Alfresco. Besides - what do you mean by that. Alfresco is a repository storing data. Do you want a backup, just a reduction of your active data sets, a duplication of datasets … ?
Norgan

[itsard]

Thanks for the reply.
My requirement is moving the archived data to another repository.When need be retrieving that data back from the archived repository and access the content.
Does Alfresco provide facility to move data to another repository and access multiple repositories simultaneously.

[norgan]

As mentioned above, there is no prepared function for that (beeing still kind of archiving). But you have about a dozen or so different APIs, using different standards to make data accessible. Again - Alfresco is primarily a data storage server - with added clients as Explorer, Share, Mobile, allowing to use the storage out of the box. You will have to build what you need on one side or the other.

Norgan