What are the Reasons for Data Loss and Data Damages?
Ensuring the integrity of archive data during the retention period is necessary to minimize business risks and to comply with various requirements (e.g. laws, industry-specific regulations and internal demands). The most common reasons for data loss and unintentional data modification include silent data corruption, limitations of hardware replications, accidental deletion and data migrations.
Silent data corruption
Silent data corruption refers to accidental changes of bits on the storage hardware, without an external control of its condition. This can falsify archive data and make it unreadable. Data aging, media failures and chemical or electromagnetic processes can cause these changes of bits.
Limitations of hardware mirroring and reorganization of data
Hardware-based archive systems include the risk of transmitting logical failures onto the target system during replication of data on the storage layer. Hardware-based archive systems sometimes use RAID-configurations which organize several physical bulk storages. These configurations can cause unintentional data modifications: The higher the amount of data in a storage, the more often data needs to be reorganized. This increases the probability that certain data has already been transmitted - while the related parity information has not. Unwanted events which occur at the moment of data transmission – e. g. a short-term non-availability of the write cache – can cause data loss.
Data migrations
Data retention periods often require multiple migrations from one system to another. Data migrations can cause unintentional transmission failures, which can result in damages or loss of sensitive and critical data. For instance, content-based and important metadata like retention periods, time stamps or IDs may be lost.
