Email backup vs. email archive
Email is still the most dominant form of communication. Both email backups and email archiving are critical for any company’s business continuity plan (BCP). In this article we’ll explore what they are good for, and how they complement each other.
What's an email backup?
An email backup – or any backup for that matter – is a snapshot of your data at a specific time. Let’s say you backup your data daily, so in case of a hardware failure or data corruption you may lose up to 1 day of emails. However, the majority of your data is safe in the backups.
Know that your backups are as good as your restores, so be sure to test your backups periodically by restoring data to another computer. If anything goes unexpected, then there’s still time to fix your backup or restore procedure.
What's an email archive?
The benefits of email archiving
End users are allowed to self service themselves freeing up IT human resources. If a user accidentally deletes his email, then he simply logs in to the archive, and restore the missing email with a few clicks. No more IT tickets, and frustrating waiting.
Final words
There’s one final question. Should you backup your email archive? Definitely yes. It doesn’t matter if it’s an on-premise archive or it’s in the cloud. Accidents may happen at both places. Be sure to prepare to them.
I hope I convinced you that both email backup and email archiving are crucial components of a well rounded disaster recovery plan. You probably backup your emails already. Let’s connect if you need email archiving as well.