Periodically there’ll be a post about storage that counsels the more obvious fact that “Backup is not Archive”. Less frequently discussed, but perhaps more important, is the fact that archive is not backup. To focus on why, and how this is the case, I want to look at email archive.
If we look at a standard email archive model – say, something like SourceOne, then it can, if you squint a bit, look a little like an email backup product – but it’s not really. SourceOne can not only discover and handle archive storage for existing email when it’s installed, but it has the option of automatically ingesting email into the archive as soon as it’s received. Users can then, if they want to, retrieve email directly from the archive rather than asking for a “brick level” recovery.
But is the email archive a backup?
While the short answer is “no”, the long answer is a little more complex than you might think.
Consider the definition of a backup:
A backup is a copy of any data that can be used to restore the data as/when required to its original form. That is, a backup is a valid copy of data, files, applications, or operating systems that can be used for the purposes of recovery.
(From “Enterprise Systems Backup and Recovery: A corporate insurance policy“)
Now, if we consider an email system from the perspective of end user requests for item level recovery, then in that narrow instance, we would be forced to declare the archive to indeed be a backup. However, if the email archive system is unable to restore the entire system state of the email server – from the OS right through to the email database – then from a broader, disaster recovery and system recovery perspective, archive is not backup.
As archive systems grow in complexity and offer more rich feature sets, there’s a blurry line where some people struggle to understand why they’d backup and archive the same system(s). So we provide the litmus test:
Regardless of what the archive system allows recovery of, if it does not allow recovery of the entire system, it’s not a backup.
So in that sense, an email archive system that allows brick level recovery, but can’t facilitate reconstructing the entire email server functionality is not a backup.
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