Email backup and email archiving
What’s the difference, and why do you need both?
We all need help from time to time. Sometimes we need to retrace our steps so that we can put something right. Sometimes we need to replay, or even prove, what we said or did. And sometimes (unfortunately) disasters simply happen, and we want to restore things exactly to as they were.
Email backup and email archiving both play valuable roles in enabling us to do these things and much more. Here’s why you need both.
Email backup is a snapshot in time
When you back up your email, it’s the equivalent of taking a photo, capturing what it looks like at exactly the moment you take it. This makes it ideal for disaster recovery. By preserving your email data in a backup, you can reinstate it after a failure of any kind.
Email backups tend to be used by IT teams for system restoration to avoid data loss.
Email archiving records your complete history
When you archive your email, you’re capturing everything: the sequence of events as they happen, similar to an unedited video or dashcam footage. This enables you to replay events, and trace them back through every stage, from origination to deletion. Email archiving captures email data in real time, storing it in an easy-to-access, searchable database that preserves audit trails and ensures compliance with retention requirements (such as for GDPR, CCPA, SOX and HIPAA).
Email archives enable all users to easily access email history and quickly find the item they need.
Deleted emails
Deleted emails are not captured in an email backup if they’ve already gone when the backup takes place. But they can still be seen in the email archiver, as the complete record of your email history includes deletions. Every email enters the email archiver in real time as soon it is transmitted or received, and is preserved there.
Data organization and management
Backup data is all about dates: each backup relates to the date on which it was taken. And it’s a complete picture. Old backups can be deleted according to your retention policy, whether that’s keeping a backup for one year or twenty. Whereas real-time email archiving happens on an item-by-item basis, so data can be organized into categories, dates, types, metadata, or how long you need to retain it for. This makes it highly searchable, and also means that it’s easy to ensure the correct retention policy is being applied for each item type (for example, if only 5% of your emails need to be kept for 10 years, you don’t have to hold onto the other 95% as well).
In the case of email backups, access is usually restricted to IT teams, as this is very much a ‘backroom’ function. Email archiving, however, can be set up for everyone to access, according to the role-based rights and permissions you set for them.
Email archiving enables auditing and verification
Effective email archiving should enable effective ediscovery, guaranteeing data integrity and authenticity, especially if challenged by a third party. Libraesva Email Archiver hashes, timestamps and certifies (RFC3161) every email using AES 256 encryption to ensure its validity and integrity – if needed, the timestamp can be assessed by third parties using non-proprietary tools.
Email archiving frees up space and accelerates search
Having a robust and complete archive means you don’t need to store your entire email history on your mail server: you can keep as many recent years as you need, and archive the rest. Every email can still be accessed easily when you have an archiving solution that’s designed to interface seamlessly with your existing systems, such as Libraesva Email Archiver, which enables rapid searching by text, attributes and metadata for efficient discovery. It’s so fast that even complex searches returning hundreds of thousands of items are typically returned within 0.1 seconds.
Email archives and email backups are both essential
Regular email backups are a must. Hopefully you’ll never need to implement disaster recovery processes, but being able to restore your email data to the last point before things went wrong is a safety net that no company wants to be without. The more frequently your email is backed up, the more up to date your restored data will be.
At the same time real-time email archiving runs constantly in the background, storing a continuous item-by-item history of your email data that users can reference at any time. This gives you a searchable, tamper-proof record of every email interaction – vital when you need to ensure compliance with standards or legal requirements, and if you ever need to verify the integrity of historical emails.
