Email Backup

Why would I need an archive if I already have a backup?

Most companies back up their mail server or hosted mailboxes. This is very effective as a disaster recovery strategy to mitigate data loss and downtime during an outage or security incident but nowhere near sufficient when it comes to compliance or eDiscovery.

Legal and Regulatory Compliance - Retention and Deletion

The Archive enables organizations to meet legal and regulatory requirements for data retention and deletion with features like tamper-proof storage, legal holds, audit logs, and deletion requests, which are specifically designed to facilitate compliance.

While a backup can be used to retrieve emails that are no longer available on the primary system, this is limited to the email as it was at the point in time when the backup was taken. This does not prove that the email was not altered prior to this point, and there is a risk that an email could be sent or received and deleted between backups, which would exclude it from that backup. Legal hold and audit logs are rarely seen in backup solutions, and deletion is extremely challenging, as a given email will often exist in dozens of backups, and ensuring that it is removed and cannot be restored is extremely challenging. Some organisation opt to ignore backups, and review any deletions when they restore data, which brings its own governance challenges.

eDiscovery - Search and Retrieval

The Archive has advanced indexing, search and retrieval functionalities, making it easier to locate specific emails or attachments based on various criteria like sender, recipient, date, keywords, or attachments. This can be particularly valuable when dealing with legal matters, customer inquiries, or internal investigations.

Email backup solutions generally have limited search capabilities and may require restoring entire backups to retrieve specific emails, which can be time-consuming and impractical. Any search of a backup is also limited to the data in that backup, which will often mean a parallel search must be performed on the live environment.

Storage Management

An archive allows older or less frequently accessed emails to be deleted from the primary mailbox, which frees up valuable storage space and improves the performance of the email system. Email content in the archive is deduplicated, compressed and automatically moved to cost effective storage based on age and frequency of access.

In contrast, email backup typically involves making copies of all emails, including those already stored on the server, resulting in redundant data and increased storage requirements. Backups themselves can be stored on cheap storage but users do not have day to day access to backups, so will need to retain email on the email system, which cannot.

Long-Term Preservation

The Archive is designed to preserve emails for the long term, ensuring their integrity, accessibility, and readability over any timeframe, with clients still using the technology to access emails that were ancient when they were imported back in 2000!

Email backups, while useful for short-term data recovery, may not provide the same level of assurance for long-term preservation. Any IT manager who isn't worried by the idea of restoring a 30 year old backup has never had to!