Frequently asked questions-Email Archiving FAQ
Email archiving process <<previous|next>> :If you plan to migrate your email to a newer version, should you wait to adopt an archiving system?FAQ:
I back up my email servers on a regular basis -- can't I just use those as an archive?
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That's the most asked question when I'm doing seminars; aren't my backup tapes my archive? A user may be relying on tapes that way, but they're not necessarily the best solution for an archive.
A backup is usually a disaster recovery (DR) copy or image of a system (e.g., an email system, a file system, shares, etc.) and it's a proprietary format of the entire system or server that you're protecting. Companies that use backups as archives often find that the backups are virtually impossible to search for files or emails of interest, particularly in the event of legal discovery requests. With backup tapes, the company would need to restore each backup to a dummy server and locate the needed emails manually. An email archive allows you to store and locate individual messages through indexing -- there's no need to search entire servers.
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Backup tapes and archives both serve useful purposes, but an archive is a way to store and search email more efficiently. As a rule, a backup tape is not an archive and should not be viewed that way.
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19 Oct 2006