Data Hoarding: The Backup Problem
Redmond Magazine, Friday, June 5th, 2026
Letting data pile up rather than deleting it makes backups slower, costlier, and harder to recover.
This Redmond Magazine article addresses the backup consequences of data hoarding, the tendency to keep everything because deleting feels riskier than retaining. It argues that unchecked data accumulation degrades backup operations, making them slower to run, more expensive to store, and harder to recover from when an incident occurs.
The piece encourages IT teams to recognize that indiscriminate retention is not a safe default but a growing operational liability for backup performance and recoverability. It points toward disciplined data retention and lifecycle management as the remedy, so that backup windows, storage costs, and recovery times stay manageable as data volumes grow.