Despite the best efforts of many, email is alive and well and remains a critical communication tool for many (most?) businesses. As the volume and the criticality of email grows, effective management of this data is essential.
Two primary solutions exist addressing this need: email archiving and email backup.
While they both aim to preserve email data, their purposes and functionalities differ significantly. Understanding these differences can you make informed decisions about which solution best suits the needs of your business.
Businesses in sectors such as Healthcare, Aged/Community Care and Financial Services have specific information retention and privacy policies that should be read and understood in conjunction with the general information provided in this article.
What is Email Archiving?
Email archiving involves capturing, indexing, and storing email communications in a centralised and searchable repository. This process ensures that emails are preserved in their original form, ideally in or near to real-time, providing a reliable and immutable (unchangeable) email storage solution.
An online email archive is particularly beneficial for compliance, legal, and business record-keeping purposes. It allows businesses to retain emails for extended periods, often several years or even decades, depending on regulatory requirements.
What is an Email Backup?
An Email backup, on the other hand, involves creating periodic copies of the entire email database. These backups are designed for short-term data protection and recovery, ensuring that emails can be restored in the event of data loss, corruption, or accidental deletion. Email backups are typically used for disaster recovery, providing a snapshot of the email system at a specific point in time.
Key Differences Between Email Archiving and Email Backup
Purpose and Functionality
Email Archiving: The primary purpose of email archiving is long-term data retention and compliance. It allows businesses to meet legal requirements by preserving emails in a structured and easily retrievable format. Archiving solutions offer advanced search capabilities, enabling users to locate specific emails based on various criteria such as date, sender, or keywords.
Email Backup: The main goal of email backup is to protect against data loss. Backups are used to restore the entire email system or specific mailboxes after a disaster or data loss event. Unlike archives, backups do not offer granular search capabilities and are not designed for long-term data retention.
Storage Management
Email Archiving: Archiving solutions optimize storage by compressing and deduplicating emails, reducing the strain on email servers and reducing the size of user mailboxes. This process frees up space on primary storage systems reducing licensing costs in some situations.
Email Backup: Backups maintain a copy of the email data without optimizing storage. This can lead to increased storage requirements as multiple copies of the same data are kept.
Data Retention and Preservation
Email Archiving: Archives provide immutable email storage, preserving emails in their original state for long-term retention. This is crucial for compliance and eDiscovery purposes, ensuring that emails remain unaltered and accessible for legal or audit requests.
Email Backup: Backups are intended for short-term retention, typically ranging from a few days to a few months. They are updated periodically, and older backups may be overwritten to maintain the most recent data.
Retrieval and Usage
Email Archiving: Archives offer robust search functions, allowing precise retrieval of emails. Users can access archived emails through a dedicated interface, making it easy to find specific communications.
Email Backup: Backups are primarily used for restoring the entire email system or specific mailboxes. They do not provide the same level of searchability or organization as archives.
Benefits of Email Archiving for Businesses
- Compliance and Legal Protection: An online email archive helps businesses meet regulatory requirements by preserving emails for the required duration. This reduces the risk of non-compliance fines and legal issues.
- Enhanced eDiscovery Capabilities: Archiving solutions simplify the eDiscovery process by providing advanced search capabilities, allowing businesses to quickly locate and retrieve relevant emails for legal or audit purposes.
- Improved Storage Management: By offloading emails from primary storage systems, archiving solutions reduce the strain on email servers and improve overall system performance - in fact, it can provide users with an almost unlimited sized mailbox.
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: An email archive serves as a crucial component of a business continuity plan, ensuring that email data is protected and recoverable in case of system failures or cyberattacks.
- Knowledge Management and Preservation: Archives retain all email communications, preserving valuable business intelligence and institutional knowledge for future reference.
- Increased Productivity: With easy access to archived emails, employees can quickly find past communications, reducing time spent searching for specific emails or attachments.
Conclusion
While both email archiving and email backup play important roles in data management, they serve different purposes. Email archiving offers significant advantages for businesses, particularly in terms of compliance, long-term data retention, and efficient data retrieval.
Email backups provide immediate disaster recovery, while email archiving ensures compliance and efficient data management.
Where a business is using services such as Microsoft 365, or Google Workspace, backups for Disaster Recovery are handled by the service provider - these may protect you from complete data loss, however, the data is only restorable by the service provider and only in the event of a complete disaster.
When email is a critical business tool for your organisation, having a real-time, immutable , secure and accessible email archive may be the best data search and recovery tool you can have!
