Skip to main content
  • Industry Solutions
    • Managed Service Providers
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Developers & Startups
    • Healthcare
    • Trading and Financial
      • Chicago Managed Trading Servers
      • Trading and Financial Colocation: Chicago & New Jersey
    • IBM AS/400 and iSeries Users
  • Support
    • Register
    • View Tickets
    • Submit a Ticket
    • Knowledgebase
    • News
  • Steadfast Blog
  • Steadfast Podcasts
  • Contact Us
Home
  • Call Us
  • Call | 888.281.9449
  • Login
  • Search

This form logs you into your management portal account. To access your help desk account, click here and use the form to the right of the news.

  • Cloud Hosting
    • Cloud Hosting
    • Private Cloud
    • Hybrid Cloud
    • Public Cloud
    • Cloud Storage
      • Secure File Share
      • Wasabi Cloud Storage
    • Virtual Data Center Platform
  • Managed Hosting
    • Bare Metal Dedicated Servers
      • Deep Learning GPU Dedicated Servers
      • Linux Dedicated Servers
      • Windows Dedicated Servers
    • Virtual Private Servers
    • Data Center Colocation
      • Managed Colocation
      • Chicago: 350 E Cermak
      • Chicago: 725 S Wells
      • Edison, New Jersey
    • Security & Compliance
      • Managed Firewall
      • SSL VPN
      • DDoS Protection
      • Email Security
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery
    • Backup
    • Disaster Recovery
    • Veeam Backup & Replication
    • Veeam Cloud Connect
    • Wasabi Cloud Storage
  • Why Steadfast
    • Why Steadfast?
    • About Steadfast
      • Our History
      • News and Press
    • Data Centers & Network
      • Our Data Centers
      • Our Network
      • Network Test
      • Peering Policy
    • Customer Stories
    • Service Level Agreement
  • Industry Solutions
    • Managed Service Providers
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Developers & Startups
    • Healthcare
    • Trading and Financial
      • Chicago Managed Trading Servers
      • Trading and Financial Colocation: Chicago & New Jersey
    • IBM AS/400 and iSeries Users
  • Support
    • Register
    • View Tickets
    • Submit a Ticket
    • Knowledgebase
    • News
  • Steadfast Blog
  • Steadfast Podcasts
  • Contact Us
Close
Return to All Blog Posts
Backups vs. Archives: What's The Difference?

Backups vs. Archives: What's The Difference?

August 9, 2018 in
Disaster Recovery

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.

Share This
facebook twitter email compact

Comments (0)

Leave a Comment

Get an image next to your comment by visiting Gravatar.com and uploading a profile photo that links to your address.

Search the Blog

Categories

backup
(1)
bare metal
(1)
Business Talk
(23)
Chicago
(11)
Chicago colocation
(1)
Cloud
(34)
cloud backup
(1)
cloud services
(2)
colocation
(4)
colocation services
(1)

Archives

  • August 2022 (1)
  • March 2022 (3)
  • October 2021 (1)
  • January 2021 (1)
  • July 2020 (1)
  • June 2020 (1)
  • April 2020 (1)
  • March 2020 (1)
  • August 2019 (1)
  • July 2019 (1)

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS Feed
  • 312.602.2689
  • ColoHouse Sales
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn

Services

  • Cloud Hosting
  • Managed Hosting
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery

Solutions By Industry

  • Enterprise Solutions
  • Trading & Financial
  • Healthcare
  • Developers & Startups
© 2023 Steadfast
  • Log In
  • Site Map
  • Legal Info & Privacy Policy