Liberty Bank & Trust Holds 10 TB and Ages Out Another 10 TB Automatically With Files.com

Liberty Bank and Trust Company is the largest Black-owned financial institution in the United States. Headquartered in New Orleans, the bank has more than $1 billion in assets and a full retail and commercial franchise serving businesses, homeowners, churches, and non-profits across the country.

It is also regulated on every side. Liberty is a Louisiana state-chartered, FDIC-member institution, and a bank under that regime generates records constantly, including call recordings and security logs. Regulation and bank policy say exactly how long each class of record must be kept. Those retention periods are measured in years. The storage they sat on was measured in whatever fit on the bank's own SAN and NAS.

Retention Measured in Years, Storage Measured in Hardware

Liberty's archive tier was its own on-premises storage: a local SAN, plus a NAS that was running out of room. Onto that finite hardware flowed data with long clocks attached. Syslog archives from the bank's SolarWinds LEM log platform carried a 396-day retention requirement. Other records ran on a one-year clock, call recordings on 90 days.

The condition underneath all of it: retention was a procedure, not a control. Data the bank was required to keep crowded storage it could not easily expand, and data that had reached the end of its clock left only when someone remembered to delete it. For a bank whose IT leadership has to show that its procedures match its policy, a retention control that lives in people's memories is a standing gap, and it is exactly the kind of gap an examination surfaces.

The problem persisted because the source systems could not move. SolarWinds LEM runs on-premises, and archives had to keep flowing every night. The available answers each solved half of it: expanding on-prem storage bought space without enforcement, and tracking deletion dates by hand across different clocks does not survive contact with a busy IT calendar. Meanwhile archives accumulate daily and obligations run for years, so the distance between what had to be kept and what fit locally only widened.

What Liberty needed was an archive tier that could take a nightly push from on-prem systems at real volume, hold historical data off the SAN, and apply a different retention clock to each class of data automatically. It had to delete on the day policy says, and not before, without anyone managing the lifecycle. Liberty Bank & Trust selected Files.com to be that archive tier.

A Nightly Push Off the SAN, and a Clock on Every Folder

Files.com became the bank's governed older-storage tier. Anything Liberty does not want occupying the local SAN moves off, and expires by rule.

The first workload was the SolarWinds LEM archive. The bank seeded roughly 500 GB of alert-database archives using the Files.com CLI, then used the Files.com Agent and a nightly scheduled Files.com Automation to move new archives from local storage. The push runs one way, so clearing space on the SAN never deletes the archive copy, and expiring the archive never reaches back into the on-prem folders.

Retention is enforced where the data lives. Files.com File Expiration rules are set per folder to match each clock: 396 days on syslog archives, one year on other historical data, 90 days on call recordings. The sweep runs daily, deletes anything past its date, and records every deletion in the same logs as any other file action. Deleted files are retained as restorable backups for a window before final removal, so the rules are enforceable without being irreversible.

The Clocks Run at Scale

With the archive workflow in production, Liberty Bank & Trust replaced retention that depended on someone remembering a deletion date with rules Files.com applies every day.

• Historical data leaves the SAN and NAS automatically. Nightly runs range from dozens to thousands of files, and the workflow has absorbed peak days of more than 100,000 write operations.
• Retention enforces itself. A single expiration sweep removed nearly a terabyte of data that had reached the end of its clock, with no one issuing a delete.
• The clocks demonstrably run. As of June 2026, the bank holds about 10 terabytes of active archive on Files.com, and roughly as much again has already been deleted under the retention rules, with more data sitting in the deleted-but-restorable window.
• Taking on another data class is a folder and an expiration rule. The next retention obligation gets the same nightly push and its own clock, with no new procedure for staff to carry.

Procedures That Match Policy

Before Files.com, keeping data consumed finite NAS capacity and deleting it was a task a person performed. Today, Files.com expiration rules hold each class of record for its required period, remove it when that period ends, and leave a log for IT leadership to show that procedure matches policy.

Liberty's retention obligations did not get smaller. What changed is that the archive tier itself enforces them, which is the difference between retention as something a regulated bank intends and retention as something its platform does.