Retrieving the art of archiving

If you had large amounts of data, most of which was never accessed, would you store it on your most expensive tier-1 storage? And if most of this data never changed, would you deploy expensive replication or mirroring technologies to constantly make and update extra copies of it? Would you intentionally slow down the response times of your environment on a daily basis to make updated backup copies of this unchanged data, accumulating up to 27 identical backups on tape or disk volumes before you began to re-use the media? Would you hire and pay people to spend their time collecting these new backups of the same unchanged data in order to send the data to an offsite vault where many other backup copies of the same unchanged data already existed? The answer to these questions is, naturally, no; yet these scenarios are exactly what most IT organisations do.