
Email archiving is a business and regulatory compliance necessity Email archiving solutions were created to make retention challenges easier to manage and to meet legal and regulatory compliance needs. For IT, this scenario is no longer a crisis it’s just a normal day at work. In most cases, it’s faster to restore files from an email backup than an email archive. Reliable email backup solutions are built for convenience and speed, allowing IT administrators to easily locate and quickly restore the “oops, I deleted something important” file in question. For example, how many times have your users (or you) accidentally deleted an important email? If that email wasn’t backed up, you can waste hours tracking down another copy, try to recapture the lost content from memory or worse, face the negative consequences of having permanently lost important information. The most common use case for email backup solutions is to protect organizations from user error. Email backup protects against user error and accidental loss Email backup and recovery solutions are designed to store records of email data, safeguarding them against intentional or accidental loss and enabling any “lost” data to be easily and quickly restored. Today’s email backup and email archiving solutions are designed for different, albeit both necessary functions. What’s the difference between email archiving vs. Email archiving solutions exist for good reason. According to an AIIM user survey dating back to at least 2010, “63 percent of organizations (had) little or no confidence that e-mails related to commitments and obligations made by themselves and their staff (were) recorded, complete and recoverable.” Manually searching for emails and restoring from tape took time – a lot of time – the process often failed, and the costs of successful retrieval could be enormous. But before we get too nostalgic for simpler times, let’s remember that wasn’t a great solution even at the time. Before cloud solutions became a commodity, it was common for businesses to backup email data to tape, which could be stored offsite, for “archiving” purposes.


If we go back in time, it’s easy to see why confusion lingers today. Although some use the terms interchangeably, there are technical, business, risk, and compliance differences between the two kinds of solutions. Just because you have an email backup does not mean you are archiving your email. This is a critical distinction. No, email backup is NOT the same thing as email archiving. Let’s get this common misconception out of the way first. Is email backup the same thing as email archiving?
