Backup or Archive – What suits your need best?

Many organizations have been equating long term retention of backups as archiving whereas backup and archiving are too separate things and should not be treated as same or interchangeable.

Archiving helps reduce the backup load by moving the older data from the production systems to an archival system. This reduces the amount of data on the production systems enhancing performance and reducing backup window for the production systems.

While moving the data, the archival application leaves a stub on the production system. For mailing applications, individual emails are moved from production system reducing the production mailbox size and load considerably. When the user accesses the data from production system, he actually accesses the stub which in turn accesses the data from archival system to fetch it for him. The archival applications offer flexibility in terms of automatically choosing what to archive based on the size, attachments, date & time of creation or access etc. The other advantage is the long term retention of data without any load on production systems and its availability in its native format when you need it.

Backup on the other hand helps preserve multiple copies of the production data on a different media to help in the event of loss of production data. Backup does not move any data from production systems and does not reduce any load there. Moreover, backups are not stored in the native format; you need to recover them back to the native format from the backup device.