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<\/a><\/p>\nSo, let’s stop for a moment and consider the differences between the three.<\/p>\n
There’s one key differentiation we can establish between them immediately, one that sets backup apart from the other two, so we’ll start with backup \u2013 a topic, as you might know, is pretty near and dear to my heart. Here’s the definition of a backup:<\/p>\n The simplest possible explanation of a backup is that it is a copy operation \u2013 it reads the source content, and creates a new copy, which can be used, in the event of the source content being lost, to recreate the source.<\/p>\n Now, an archive is not a backup (regardless of what some RFP writers may think). This, effectively, is an archive:<\/p>\n So, I’m being slightly cheeky in suggesting the delete immediately follows the copy operation. It does for some interpretations of archive, and it doesn’t for others. It’s perhaps a logically cleaner operation when it does, but there can be reasons to not do it immediately. Basically, the archive operation is: “Take a copy of the content. At some point in the future we will delete the original content, knowing there is an archive copy available.” Now, a decade or more ago when primary storage ran at a premium, the archive usually would mean immediately deleting the source once the destination copy had been verified. Now though, it might not \u2013 consider, for instance:<\/p>\n In both cases, you can see that the dependency for ‘seamless’ access belongs to the user-facing application. The email archive will generally result in a plugin in the email application to retrieve archived email content \u2013 and likewise for the the medical imaging software. In both cases, it’s highly specific. Without that actual application or plugin, the archived data won’t be returned. In simpler systems, it’s entirely up to the end user to find that data. This will be particularly so in things like engineering and design companies: projects get archived when they’re complete (or a certain time after they’ve completed), and users will know to go looking on the ‘archive server’, etc., if they want to access content from that prior project.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>\n