Archiving vs. Backing Up
Many organizations confuse email backup with email archiving. Here’s a simple way to understand the difference. Backups are for disaster recovery, while archives are for retention and discovery.
Backups were never really intended to meet regulatory requirements and other compliance needs. They most effectively serve as a short-term insurance policy to facilitate disaster recovery (assuming they are kept offsite).
Archiving, on the other hand, is specifically designed to quickly and easily meet regulatory requirements and other compliance needs. In addition, archiving serves another important role – it can reduce the strain on your in-house email servers. With growing email volumes and skyrocketing storage costs, email archiving can:
- Reduce the size of your email stores
- Reduce your backup windows
- Reduce the amount of IT budget earmarked for storage
For most modern organizations, the operational, legal and compliance challenges of email necessitate going beyond simple backups. The table below demonstrates how email archiving goes beyond simple backups in terms of mailbox management, compliance and legal discovery.
| PRIMARY PURPOSE | BACKUP (Disaster Recovery) |
ARCHIVING (Retention & Discovery) |
| Archive | ||
| Offload message store to reduce backup window | No | Yes |
| Single-instance storage | No | Yes |
| Eliminate the need for PST files | No | Yes |
| Comply | ||
| Automatically retain every email and attachment | No | Yes |
| Tamper-proof storage | No | Yes |
| Prevent data corruption | No | Yes |
| Discover | ||
| Index full text for fast indentification | No | Yes |
| Granular legal hold of individual items | No | Yes |
| Rapid, low-cost discovery and retrieval | No | Yes |
Learn more about the risks of backups and the immediate benefits of hosted email archiving in our Archiving vs. Backing Up datasheet.
