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Of Backups and Archives: Page 2 of 2

Therefore, backup repositories are organized by context like where the data was when it was backed up and when it was backed up. Actually accessing the data requires restoring it and usually reconnecting the applications that support it. Anyone who's ever tried to recover data from an Exchange 5.5 backup can attest to just how much effort it takes.

On top of that, most backup applications are designed to restore data that's been backed up recently, keeping just a few months to a year of index data, so just figuring out what tape has the June 14, 2006 backup of the executive home folders is a project.

Archive your files, email, etc with Mimosa Nearpoint, Enterprise Vault, MetaLogix PAM, Atempo's Digital Archive, EMC SourceOne or any of the seeming hundreds of other archiving applications on the market and it builds an index not just of your data's location and backup time but its content as well as its context, and that full text index lasts as long as you've told it you want to retain the data. Now you can search for documents from June 1-June 20 2006 including the keywords "ohnston, Smythe and harassment".

Of course all that indexing takes time so an archive solution won't Hoover up data as fast as a backup solution can. But remember that you only have to archive data once, where most people backup their data weekly. Good archive solutions do single instance storage and compress files then store them in multiple locations, which also takes some time but reduces storage space and reduces the need to backup the archive.

Next time we'll talk about storage for archive data. Hint: Spinning rust isn't the only option.