Keep in mind that backups are for recovery while archives are for discovery. Backups and archives are often confused but understanding the differences can result in significant savings of time and money. Backing up and archiving may be considered IT tasks, but recovery and discovery are capabilities the business wants and is willing to pay for.
Archives and backups are not the same, and there is a use case for each. Sometimes minor adjustments may be required to make the use case work. Understanding the basics of backups and archives can lead to significant savings at a monetary and effort level.
Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
What is the difference between a backup and a data archive? When should I use one over the other? They are not the same and confusing the two concepts could be expensive.
Backups and archives are two very different operations that are quite often confused or misplaced. IT and business leaders are tasked with protecting corporate data from a variety of threats. They also must conform to industry, geographical, and legal compliance regulations. Backup solutions keep the data safe from destruction. If you have a backup, why do you also need an archive? Archive solutions hold data for a long period of time and can be searched. If you have an archive, why do you also need a backup solution? Backups and archives used to be the same. Remember when you would keep the DAT tape in the same room as the argon gas fire suppression system for seven years? Now that's just not feasible. Some situations require a creative approach or a combination of backups and archives.
Understand the difference between archives and backups and you will understand why the two solutions are necessary and beneficial to the business.
P.J. Ryan
Research Director, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group
Your Challenge
|
Common Obstacles
|
Info-Tech’s Approach
|
Keep in mind that backups are for recovery while archives are for discovery. Backups and archives are often confused but understanding the differences can result in significant savings of time and money. Backing up and archiving may be considered IT tasks but recovery and discovery are capabilities the business wants and is willing to pay for.
What it IS
A data archive is an alternate location for your older, infrequently accessed production data. It is indexed and searchable based on keywords. Archives are deleted after a specified period based on your retention policy or compliance directives. |
What it IS NOT
Archives are not an emergency copy of your production data. They are not any type of copy of your production data. Archives will not help you if you lose your data or accidentally delete a file. Archives are not multiple copies of production data from various recovery points. |
Why use it
Archives move older data to an alternate location. This frees up storage space for your current data. Archives are indexed and can be searched for historical purposes, compliance reasons, or in the event of a legal matter where specific data must be provided to a legal team. |
What it IS
A backup is a copy of your data from a specific day and time. It is primarily used for recovery or restoration if something happens to the production copy of data. The restore will return the file or folder to the state it was in at the time of the backup. Backups occur frequently to ensure the most recent version of data is copied to a safe location. A typical backup plan makes a copy of the data every day, once a week, and once a month. The data is stored on tapes, disk, or using cloud storage. |
What it IS NOT
Backups are not designed for searching or discovery. If you backup your email and must go to that backup in search of all email pertaining to a specific topic, you must restore the full backup and then search for that specific topic or sender. If you kept all the monthly backups for seven years, that will mean repeating that process 84 times to have a conclusive search, assuming you have adequate storage space to restore the email database 84 times. Backups do not free up space. |
Why use it
Backups protect your data in the event of disaster, deletion, or accidental damage. A good backup strategy will include multiple backups on different media and offsite storage of at least one copy. |
A leading manufacturing company found themselves in a position where they had to decide between archiving or doing nothing.
The company had completed several acquisitions and ended up with multiple legacy applications that had been merged or migrated into replacement solutions. These legacy applications were very important to the original companies and although the data they held had been migrated to a replacement solution, executives felt they should hold onto these applications for a period of time, just in case.
Some of the larger applications were archived using a modern archiving solution, but when it came to the smaller applications, the cost to add them to the archiving solution greatly exceeded the cost to just keep them running and maintain the associated infrastructure.
A research advisor from Info-Tech Research Group joined a call with the manufacturing company and discussed their situation. The difference between archives and backups was explained and through the course of the conversation it was discovered that the solution was a modified backup. The application data had already been preserved through the migration, so data could be accessed in the production environment. The requirement to keep the legacy application up and running was not necessary but in compliance with the request to keep the information, the data could be exported from the legacy application into a non-sequential database, compressed, and stored in cloud-based cold storage for less than five dollars per terabyte per month. The manufacturing company’s staff realized that they could apply this same approach to several of their legacy applications and save tens of thousands of dollars in the process.
Backups |
Backups are for recovery. A backup is a snapshot copy of production data at a specific point in time. If the production data is lost, destroyed, or somehow compromised, the data can be restored from the backup. |
Archives |
Archives are for discovery. It is production data that is moved to an alternate location to free up storage space, allow the data to be searchable, and still hold onto the data for historical or compliance purposes. |
Archives and backups are not the same, and there is a use case for each. Sometimes minor adjustments may be required to make the use case work. Understanding the basics of backups and archives can lead to significant savings at a monetary and effort level.
Production data should be backed up.
The specific backup solution is up to the business. |
Production data that is not frequently accessed should be archived.
The specific solution to perform and manage the archiving of the data is up to the business
|
If the app has been replaced and all data transferred, you want a backup not an archive if you want to keep the data.
|
A court case in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada involving Guardiola and Renown Health in 2015 is a good example of why using a backup solution to solve an archiving challenge is a bad idea.
Renown Health used a retention policy that declared any email older than six months of age as inactive and moved that email to a backup tape. Renown Health was ordered by the court to produce emails from a period of time in the past. Renown estimated that it would cost at least $248,000 to produce those emails, based on the effort involved to restore data from each tape and search for the email in question. Renown Health argued that this long and expensive process would result in undue costs.
The court reviewed the situation and ruled against Renown Health and ordered them to comply with the request (Zasio.com).
A proper archiving solution would have provided a quick and low-cost method to retrieve the emails in question.
Backups copy your data. Archives move your data. Backups facilitate recovery. Archives facilitate discovery.
Archive | Backup | |
Definition | Move rarely accessed (but still production) data to separate media. | Store a copy of frequently used data on a separate media to ensure timely operational recovery. |
Use Case | Legal discovery, primary storage reduction, compliance requirements, and audits. | Accidental deletion and/or corruption of data, hardware/software failures. |
Method | Disk, cloud storage, appliance. | Disk, backup appliance, snapshots, cloud. |
Data | Older, rarely accessed production data. | Current production data. |
Is it a backup or archive?
1Backup or archive? |
2What are you protecting? |
3Why are you protecting data? |
4Solution |
Backup Backup and/or archive.
Archive |
Device Data Application Operational Environment |
Operational recovery Disaster recovery Just in case Production storage space reduction Retention and preservation Governance, risk & compliance |
Backup Archive |
Establish an Effective Data Protection Plan
Give data the attention it deserves by building a strategy that goes beyond backup. |
|
Modernize Enterprise Storage
Current and emerging storage technologies are disrupting the status quo – prepare your infrastructure for the exponential rise in data and its storage requirements. |
|
Data Archiving Policy |
“Backup vs. archiving: Know the difference.” Open-E. Accessed 05 Mar 2022.Web.
G, Denis. “How to build retention policy.” MSP360, Jan 3, 2020. Accessed 10 Mar 2022.
Ipsen, Adam. “Archive vs Backup: What’s the Difference? A Definition Guide.” BackupAssist, 28 Mar 2017. Accessed 04 Mar 2022.
Kang, Soo. “Mitigating the expense of E-discovery; Recognizing the difference between back-ups and archived data.” Zasio Enterprises, 08 Oct 2015. Accessed 3 Mar 2022.
Mayer, Alex. “The 3-2-1 Backup Rule – An Efficient Data Protection Strategy.” Naviko. Accessed 12 Mar 2022.
“What is Data-Archiving?” Proofpoint. Accessed 07 Mar 2022.