TO BE A BACKUP MEANING ARCHIVE
Many people try to use their backup system as an archive system, meaning they keep their backups for many years – or even forever. Give me all files or emails that were created in the last three years that contain a particular phrase or were authored by a particular person. Retrievals have none of that information they just know they need all the files or records that match a set of parameters. You need to know the name of the server it was on, the database or directory it was in, the name(s) of the file or table you want back and the date when it was last seen.
Restores require you to know a lot of about where the file or data was when it was backed up otherwise, you can’t find it. A retrieval uses a range of time, such as all emails for the last three years.
A restore is also done to a single point in time, such as restoring a database to the way it looked yesterday. When you retrieve something, it’s usually a collection of related data, that may or may not have been stored on the same server or even in the same format. When you restore something, it is typically a single file, server or database. Backup systems restore and archive systems retrieve. retrievalĮven if the purpose of an archive is to save space on primary storage, it needs to be able to perform a retrieval vs a restore if it is to be called an archive. That might even be the purpose of that archive, if you’re not required by law to keep all emails. This helps keep the email system lean, saving on computing and storage resources, and making it easier to backup. Some email archive systems can purge from the email server emails that have been archived, are bigger than a certain size, and/or haven’t been accessed in over n days. You also might have an archive of every email ever sent or received by your company. You might keep current contracts and orders online, but you keep all of them in the archive, which should have an index to let you retrieve orders and contracts via the content of those orders. You might have an archive of every sales order, quote or contract your company has ever given. Someone else might be trying to prove a hostile work environment and want to see all emails from a particular set of managers that contain a certain list of words that we do not need to list here.Īn archive is what would help you accomplish all of these tasks. Their lawsuit might issue an electronic discovery request asking for all emails to and from them that contain the words moonlight, after-hours or the name of the company they were going to moonlight for. Perhaps an employee believes they were given permission to moonlight, and then was fired for doing so. Or it might be all the CAD drawings of the widget your company used to make that went out of style but is now back in style.Īnother related data set might be all emails and/or files that can prove a given point. It might be a related group of data, such as all the structural drawings of the building that just collapsed. It could be single file that had a really important item in it, such as a contract a customer signed several years ago. The most common purpose is to help you find some data from a long time ago. Where the purpose of a backup is to put something back to how it looked (usually) yesterday, an archive can serve multiple purposes.
Although not required, the original is often deleted after an archive is made. What is an archive?Īn archive is a copy of data created for reference purposes. With a good backup system, you could figure out the source of the ransomware, stop it, then restore all your data – without ever paying the hacker. Without a good backup system, your choice would be to pay the ransom. You might one day realize every file in your organization has been encrypted by a ransomware package. Someone might accidentally or maliciously delete one or more VMs in your VMware, Hyper-V or AWS EC2 configuration, and they would need to be restored. For example, a RAID 6 array might have a triple-disk failure, and all its data will need to be restored. The definition of backup really comes down to purpose, and the purpose of a backup is always the same: to restore data if something happens to it. A backup might focus on the data, as in a database dump, the operating system of the server as in a bare-metal backup, or on both as with backup of VMware. We also backup file servers (unstructured data) and databases (structured data). Examples of backups include a nightly backup of all files on your laptop or desktop, or all your photos on your iPhone being copied to iCloud in case you drop your phone.
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