What’s the Difference Between Email Backup and Email Archiving? (Questions and Answers)

Do You Know What the Difference Is Between Email Backup and Email Archiving?

We’ve all been there… We need information from an email that we received eight months ago, but somewhere in that time span, we thought we’d get all organized. We cleaned out our inbox and dumped out the trash folder. We were so proud of ourselves, weren’t we?

At that time, we weren’t concerned about getting information out of those old emails. After all, it’s all on the server or in the cloud…or something…right?

Then, just as our bad luck would have it, we desperately needed that one email out of the hundreds that we had deleted.

It’s a hard lesson to learn.

Some of us learn from our own mistakes. But if you’re one of those fortunate souls that can learn from the mistakes of others, let us tell you, “Keep reading and learn the difference between email backup and email archiving, then, use both of them!”

Because we’re all pretty sure that we know what email backup is, let’s just skip right ahead to the question you want to be answered.

What Is Email Archiving?

In simple terms, email archiving is email backup on steroids. It’s a systematic approach to preserving the content of emails, securing that content, and storing that content in an indexed manner so that the data can be recalled if and when it is needed.

Think about it like the difference between your bookshelf at home and a storage locker entirely dedicated to boxes of books cross-organized by date, subject, author, publisher, and colour.

That’s the difference between email backup and email archiving. Email backup is the short-term answer to the question, “What did I do with the phone number that he/she sent me?” Email archiving is the mid-term/long-term solution to meeting company, governmental, and industry email retention mandates.

Why Do Companies Archive Their Emails?

As we have already noted, the primary answer to this question is that most companies are required by either industry standards or governmental regulation to hold onto their emails for a certain number of years.

But there are other reasons. Here are a few.

• Email accounts get hacked on a regular basis.
• Email outages in cloud-based email solutions happen more rarely than hacks, but they are debilitating.
• In-house servers housing email backups can fail.
• Employees can accidentally or maliciously delete emails.
• Business opportunities can be lost if employees and company leadership don’t have access to stored emails.
• Organizational/institutional memory can be impacted when companies no longer have the information to pass from project to project, position to position, or from employee to employee.

How Does Email Archiving Work?

• Emails are copied from their local server or cloud server.
• Each email is encrypted with a separate key.
• Emails are organized and stored in a secure cloud environment.
• Archived emails can be searched, accessed, and viewed through an online interface.

What’s the Difference Between Basic Email Backup and Email Archiving?

Email backup is intended to be a snapshot of the emails as they were at a certain point in time. Email backup is intended to be used in an emergency situation where a company loses their recent emails and must restore those emails from a backup. Email archiving is intended for secure, indexed, long-term email storage. Record keeping and email retention compliance are the two factors that drive the need for email archiving as opposed to email backup.

Why Do Companies Move From Email Backups to Email Archiving?

• Intellectual Property Protection
• Disaster & Data Recovery Strategy
• Institutional/Organizational Memory
• Cost Optimization of Storage Options
• Email Monitoring and Investigations
• Retention Compliance Mandated by Industry or Government
• Legal Discovery

What Features Should You be Looking for in An Email Backup or Archive Solution?

• Product Support
• Restoration Speed
• Simple Control Panel Online
• Storage & Retention Without Limits
• Search Capability
• Retention Controls
• Security & Encryption
• Automatic Backup and Archiving
• Support for Your Email Solution
• Management of File Attachments
• Operates on Mobile Devices and Various Operating Systems
• Folder Management
• Allows Multiple Users

Are There Different Kinds of Email Archiving Solutions?

Yes, like any product, email archiving is tailored to suit the company’s ideal customer. Here are some general categories that email archiving solutions are customized to fit.

• Personal Email
• Small Business Email
• Online Business Email
• Mid-Size Company Email
• Enterprise-Level Email

Have questions about email backups and email archiving? The Fuelled Networks team would be happy to have a no-obligation conversation with you to answer your questions. Just pick up the phone and give us a call!

Looking for more helpful articles? We’ve picked out three for you here.

What Can Azure Stack Do For Your Business?
Amazon vs. Microsoft: Who is Better in the Cloud?
Mobile Computing (Tips and Tricks)