Electronic discovery requests are on the rise, but Storage readers seem relatively unphased by the change. So far, 57% of readers have had to recover data for legal reasons and of those, 62% were successful. Most recoveries went smoothly, though 33% of readers indicated they wouldn't want to do it again. Of the 43% who have yet to deal with an electronic discovery request, 60% are very confident/extremely confident that they'll be able to do so.

Tape is more often than not the medium from which data is recovered. Eighty-three percent of data pulled came from backup tapes and 41% came from archival tapes. The vast majority of requests are for files and e-mail (79% and 74%, respectively); only 38% of the data types requested are database records.

Some readers aren't happy with their options for recovering data. "Having the right solution in place to recover data beyond the normal data restores is a hard sell," writes one reader. "Typically, these solutions require a significant financial investment on the part of any organization."

--Trina MacDonald