Law Office Technology by Roland Schorr & Tower

Document and records retention is a hot topic in eDiscovery these days. Firms are often going to some lengths to establish, follow and audit policies that dictate when documents or items should expire and confirm that they have, in fact, been deleted.

Now it turns out that another technology that has become quite popular in offices (and eDiscovery) may actually be subverting your retention policies: Desktop Search.

If you have Google Desktop Search installed on your machine try this little test: Delete a document. If you don't have a document you want to delete, you can create a test document, let it sit on your machine for a few hours (or at least long enough for Google Desktop to index it), then delete that document. For good measure be sure to empty your Deleted Items folder or Recycle Bin.

Now...search for that document using Google Desktop. Find it? You thought it was gone...but it's not gone. That sentence send chills through the spine of every records retention specialist. And it makes eDiscovery and computer forensics folks giddy.

Why Does This Happen? Because Google Desktop keeps deleted items in its index and stores a snapshot of them. Is this a bug?! No...it's a feature. And it's been there for a long time.

What Can You Do About It? That's a little less clear, actually. In Google Desktop you CAN configure it to not show deleted items in the search results. But does that remove them from the index as well, or just not show them in the search results? I haven't been able to find the answer to this question yet.

NOTE I don't mean to pick on Google Desktop Search here; it's just the product that brought this to my attention. It is possible that other desktop search tools (Windows Desktop Search, Copernic, etc) suffer from the same problem - I haven't had time to check yet. But I will...

More on this issue as I get some more answers. For now, keep a close eye on your desktop search tool, what folders you let it index and what items it persists in indexing even after you've expired them or deleted them.

-B-