Charles Kincaid (6/20/2011)
In a design meeting when the organizer asks if there is anything not covered in the specifications, raise your hand an utter the three deadly words. DATA REMOVAL POLICY. Then duck as stuff will come flying in your direction.
I see your Data Removal Policy, and raise you a Legal Hold. Removing old data is "good"; removing old data that is subject to discovery in a multi-year lawsuit is... "not good".
In general, I agree that archiving (not backups, but archiving) and removing data past its retention policy is a good idea, but this gets very deep into data classification, very fast; it's important, but often "too difficult" to deal with, and as such it never gets done.