Backup and Archiving
Backup and
archiving are always mentioned together, as both of these technologies support
primary data storage. However, the commonalities end over here and cannot be
carried forward. But in enterprise IT world it is often observed that archive
is analogous to backup.
Simply put,
backup and archive are not the same and here’s why explained in simple terms-
Data Backup
Data backup
is intended to recover individual lost or corrupt files, or individually
corrupt operating system instances. The backed up data has both active and
inactive information which encompasses all of your production data. This backup
set is useful for purposes of recovery in case of the original copy of data is
lost or becomes inaccessible due to reasons. It is always critical that a
backup is a copy of production data and the actual data still resides on the
production storage systems.
Backups are
historically being optimized for large scale recoveries. They are written in
large blocks to dedicated hardware like tape libraries or deduplicated
disk backup appliances.
On a typical
note, these backups are scheduled, often every 24 hours, sometimes more
frequently, even hourly with some continuous data protection solutions. The
data driven by a backup is stored on a tape or a disk solution or off site like
a cloud platform. Restoration from backup can be a complex and lengthy process
depending on the volume of data to be restored.
Data
archiving
Data
archiving on the other hand, is data meant for long term retention, typically
for compliance purposes in regulated industries such as finance and legal
sectors. These are actually designed with very different access profiles. These
systems typically store individual data objects such as files, databases or email
messages and usually also capture metadata associated with each item. The
result is that an archive can provide immediate granular access to stored
information and so accessing an individual file or email is typically very easy
in an archive system.
Generally,
archiving solutions which retain and index all copies and versions of a
document, file, or email, making them easily are expected to be rapidly
retrievable by end users rather than IT admins.
So, please
do not treat your backups as archives or vice versa as same, as they serve for
different purposes.