Does email archiving require huge amounts of bandwidth?

Does email archiving require huge amounts of bandwidth?

The answer is: "It depends." It depends on what kind of email system that you're putting in place, and how you intend to move data from the email server to the email archiving. For example, suppose an employee has email traffic on a daily basis. A basic email archiving system would track email based on when it arrived in the email system. A policy might then dictate that the email be archived off the email server after 60 days. That's batch-type processing and does not require a substantial amount of bandwidth.

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Email archiving information
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However, if you're "journaling" emails -- capturing and archiving copies of email the moment each message arrives at the email server -- then yes, you're going to utilize much more bandwidth because data is being moved across the network almost continuously. Usually, users will choose this approach for regulatory or litigation purposes.

Predicting the impact of bandwidth on email archiving can be challenging. It requires substantial performance data collection and evaluation in order to understand archiving bandwidth needs. For example, an IT or email manager needs to look at the number of mailboxes per email server, the traffic per employee or mailbox in terms of message frequency and size over time to estimate bandwidth needs. Then, compare bandwidth estimates against the current bandwidth baseline to help decide whether to journal or batch the archive process (and if network upgrades are needed).

Listen to the Email archiving FAQ audiocast here.

Go back to the beginning of the Email Archiving FAQ Guide.


This was first published in October 2006

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