It was brought up today about the customers right to have their data deleted and went on to an interesting talk about backed up data (we have a rolling 93 day window for backups on AWS s3)
I was wondering if/how anyone out there goes about deleting customer data within backups? It would seem that this data protection act covers backed up data too?
How do you go about this in situations such as mine where we have a 73GB nightly backup file created everyday (expanding to 589GB data and 117GB log files) so in theory if this is fully enforceable and includes updates then we'd need to restore 93 backups it'd take:
Restore backup - 3 hours
Delete customer data - 1 minute - 2 hours (dependant on usage)
Backup 50 minutes
(I appreciate that even although this is a large database to me, working in a small company, this is still small in comparison to enterprises!)
So if we made an application automatically do this, it'd take a minimum of [4 hours per backup] * 93 = 372 hours (15 and a half days!) of processing (on a separate server, so we don't affect our live system)
Luckily we haven't had a request like this yet, but my other concern over this is, if the person writing the script to delete the data accidentally deleted part of someone elses data, we'd now have no backup to fall back on! Surely this would go against your SLA of backups?
I look forward to hearing people's views and any evidence of law on this?