That's the most asked question when I'm doing seminars; aren't my
backup tapes my archive? A user may be
relying on tapes that way, but they're not necessarily the best
solution for an
archive. @27659 A backup is usually a
disaster recovery (DR) copy or image of a system (e.g., an email
system, a
file system, shares, etc.) and it's a
proprietary format of the entire system or server that you're
protecting. Companies that use backups as archives often find
that the backups are virtually impossible to search for files or
emails of interest, particularly in the event of legal discovery
requests. With backup tapes, the company would need to restore
each backup to a dummy server and locate the needed emails
manually. An email archive allows you to store and locate
individual messages through indexing -- there's no need to
search entire servers.
Backup tapes and archives both serve useful purposes, but an
archive is a way to store and search email more efficiently. As a
rule, a backup tape is not an archive and should not be viewed that
way.
Listen to the Email
archiving FAQ audiocast here.
Go back to the beginning of the
Email Archiving FAQ Guide.