Backups vs. Archives: What's The Difference?

Businesses store data for many reasons, the most prominent of which are production use, as backups, and as archives. Once upon a time, storage was expensive and it made sense to store as little as possible. Today, every business has access to terabytes of low-cost cloud storage, but cheap isn’t free, so business owners may wonder whether they really need to keep both a backup and an archive.

The answer is “yes”, and in this article I will explain some of the differences between a backup and an archive, and why it makes sense for businesses to have both.

Backups aren’t archives, and archives aren’t backups

A backup gives businesses the ability to restore data if it is lost from their production storage or to “turn back time” if systems enter an unacceptable state, perhaps because of a malware infection. Backups must be comprehensive, up-to-date, and easily restored.

An archive stores documents and other data for retrieval at some point in the future. The data may be of little immediate use to the business’s operations, but it might prove useful for legal, historical, or analytical use in the future.

Archives are forever, backups are short lived.

Backups are designed to be restored quickly, and there is rarely any need to restore data from three, ten, or twenty years ago. The point of a backup is to allow businesses to restore their data to a specific point in time, typically to just before an unfortunate event.

Backups systems don’t keep data for many years: they protect active data that might change over the short term.

Archives are for long-term storage. An archival system must be able to store large amounts of data for many years. Just as important, it must be able to retrieve data matching specific criteria in a reasonable timeframe. Some businesses store decades of sales data, emails, employee records, internal memos, and more.

For example, a company might need to check all the emails sent by a pair of employees between two dates and cross reference those emails with sales made during the same period. A backup system simply isn’t designed for fine-grained search and retrieval of that sort. Imagine your company is involved in a legal case revolving around old data: getting at the right data from old backups is possible, but it will take longer and be more expensive.

Just as backups make poor archives, archives make poor backups. An archive stores data objects with metadata that allows for easy retrieval. It doesn’t store data volumes, applications, server state, virtual machine images, configuration files, and much else that is needed to restore a business’s infrastructure following a disaster.

To learn more about how Cloud Storage, Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery from Steadfast can help your business survive data loss, get in touch today.