Email Archive vs Backup: Easily Know Crucial Differences
In the era of globalization where cloud-based technologies are becoming the most popular choice amongst global businesses. Email communication is still the backbone of any official communication. A recent study predicted that communication emails alone are set to see a steep rise to nearly 375 billion in the year 2026. Given this, the question always hovers in the back of your mind. How you can keep your critical email data protected for longer in times to come?
As more and more global players are sharing the centerstage. Keeping their email communication data secure and protected too becomes utmost important for all enterprises. As such, the greater understanding of concepts of archival and backup can prove to be of great value in reshaping. IT infrastructure and strategy for ensuring smooth email governance and data security.
Here, in this blog, we will be discussing email archive vs backup. We will show you how email backup & email archiving. This concepts could be deployed, where the major differences between these 2 processes actually lie. How you can benefit greatly from a professional email backup tool.
Email Archive vs Backup: Major Goals & Key Variations
Before we dig deeper into email archiving vs backup. Both of these concepts focus on the question how to keep business-critical data absolutely secure and readily available for longer durations. Functionally both of these concepts are different, and therefore, understanding the idea of their usage about when and how they should be used is critical. It is always advisable by most IT experts to deploy both of these mechanisms simultaneously.
While discussing the differences between email archive vs email backup. Email archives help in storage of all incoming and outgoing emails chronologically. Over the years which can be quickly retrieved at any given point in time and remains available 24/7 at users’ disposal. This archived email data is accessible even when the email server becomes inaccessible temporarily. This feature is highly important for the users in preparing quotations, business proposals, invoices, gathering and consolidating client feedbacks, and also in executing many other business transactions seamlessly.
Contrary to this, the regular email backup helps in keeping your business communication data updated and protected. At all times, from any inadvertent damage or corruption vulnerabilities due to unforeseen technical issues. Backup email data is simply an externally stored copy of all your email communication data in a location. That is different from the original location of stored data in the email client itself or server being used. This copy can easily be used as a contingency data which can be readily restored back in case of technical failure, corruption, or issues with email client. Therefore, backup is primarily essential and integral part of any disaster recovery process.
Hope, the above discussion has helped you in differentiating email backup vs email archive.
Objectives to Be Accomplished with Email Archiving
Hope, the above discussion helped you in differentiating email backup vs email archive. Now, let us move to the objectives that can be achieved through email archiving:
- Freeing Up Space On The Server: Once archived, the archived emails can be permanently stored in archives/locally. These can be deleted from the server thereby freeing up server space which makes it cost-effective.
- Need for Individual PST Files Backup Is Eliminated: IT admins often archive the emails existing on domain emails to eliminate the need to take separate backups of individual emails. If users exceed their individual quota of email data, administrators prefer to archive it to eliminate further need for extra allotment. They invoke Auto Archive feature to automatically copy the contents of the individual mailbox to a locally available PST file. PST files can be saved to any external storage medium rather than buying additional space on the server. Saving PST data individually is considered to be an inefficient & corruption-prone way. Also, it is hard to get data directly from PST files as a PST file is not able to execute a full-text search function.
- Reduced Storage: Archiving emails avoids duplication of email data, and also yields a compressed database which requires less space for storing it for longer durations. Taking backup can also compress and allow for de-duplication of data, but email archiving provides an additional advantage of offloading critical server data space.
Know Additional Benefits Achieved with Email Archiving
- Simplified Backup & Restoration Process: Archiving emails reduces the need for the volume of storage space needed on the server, which can further enhance the speed of migration to restore all the crucial email data quickly.
- Permanent Retention of Emails: Once archived, the email data becomes error-proof, saved as existed, tamper-proof, and readily available for easy future retrieval ensuring absolutely full and complete data retention, both at the time of arrival or departure from the server (called journaling). Archiving email data is often saved using encryption rules thereby making it a secure and easy way to keep your corruption-free email data intact.
- Help Meet Legal Compliance: Archiving emails is the preferred and legally compliant way for enterprises to store long term email data. The integrity of email data remains intact even after archiving as the data is archived immediately as it was received/sent.
- Full-text Indexing for Steadfast Retrieval: The archiving email solutions often keep the metadata intact in a full-text index. This feature enables the users with quick search of email data that they are trying to retrieve. Even the customary email folder structure is maintained. The respective mailboxes make the retrieval of specific emails using full-text search.
- Allows Restoring Lost Emails At Will: Users are able to search for particular emails from archives and quickly are able to restore them in their original form without having to suffer any data loss or loss of metadata.
Useful Tip: Keeping Email Data Safe
It is always advisable to take regular backup of your email data. Nevertheless, you have a real-time archiving mechanism in place. This is a necessary protocol in order to keep you safe from any external influence. Users can stuck in multiple situations such as data corruption, damage to storage devices, any hacking attempt/accidental deletion of data. A complete loss of data in the event of any unforeseen disaster.
Why Email Backup?
End Note: Email Archiving Isn’t the Same as Email Backup
By now, you must have gathered quite lot of info & details about the differentiating factors between email archiving & email backp. Even though their objectives could be somewhat distinct in terms of data saving as well as functionalities. The major concentration is on securing & maintaining your email data in the long run. Either of these two, i.e., email archive vs backup. It is unequivocally crucial and are integral to any business unit’s IT processes. This is totally secure & fully safeguard all business-related critical email communication.
