Pelz-Sharpe Alan Pelz-Sharpe

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Backup is not Archiving

29-Nov-2007

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Industry Standards

Question: What's the difference between a backup and an archive?

Answer: A backup is designed to manage short-term risk and provide some kind of facility for disaster recovery -- an important activity for sure. An archive on the other hand is designed to help manage long term risk, ensuring that historical data can be accessed and remains authentic either for the business user or (heaven forbid) an auditor or lawyer. Both involve storage media, and both involve a policy to be instituted and enacted. In the case of backup the policy might simply dictate backing up data overnight to tape, and rotating tapes once a week. An archive on the other hand will likely have a far more rigorous set of policies around media longevity, data authenticity, and security -- alongside detailed policies relating to retention periods and compliance requirements.

In other words: just copying everything to a storage medium on a regular basis (as one does a backup) is actually a thousand miles away from having a records and retention policy that drives a corporate archive.

2008 will see ECM vendors aggressively trying to move into the archiving sector. It's a move driven (as all meaningful market dynamics are) by buyer demand. At the moment, demand stems less from a full understanding of retention and archiving, and more from the need to shift ballooning volumes of e-mails (e-mails that may well become the focus of a laywer at some future date), that are swamping mail servers. And once the e-mail challenge has been tackled, the equally massive job of archiving corporate documents will start.

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