The difference
A backup is a copy of data that can be used to restore the original if a company experiences data loss due to equipment failure, human error, ransomware, or natural disaster, a backup can be used to quickly restore that data and hence business continuity. An archive, on the other hand, is a collection of data that is kept for long-term preservation and made available for any past, current and future references that caters to regulatory, legal and compliance business requirements.
Essentially, a backup is a duplicate of data, while an archive holds original (unaltered) data that has been removed from its original location and made searchable upon request with speed and efficiency.
Both functions can be thought of as business insurance policies in principle. Having a sound backup solution in place minimizes disruptions and reduces the potential loss of productivity by means of restoring data. Having an archiving solution in place is a business’s best defense against any data contradictions by providing a searchable interface to retrieve indisputable evidence in any internal or external claims or prosecutions.
VS. 
Back up Archiving
Does a business really need both?
When both backup and archiving are used in tandem, not only will restoring data be easy, it can also ensure the data remains intact and untampered with indefinitely. With archiving, data is also backed up in a structured method to be urgently searchable on any topic, date range, classified by critical importance and comply with various legal and regulatory demands as a business scales and grows.
This allows businesses to avoid sorting through unruly soft copy storage files or piles of hard copy magnetic tapes. What’s more, not having to manually sift through terabytes of ancient storage files just to find a few that you are really looking for.
Don’t settle for just any archiving
The concept of archiving can be applied to any kind data, but especially important in email, as email is inherently unstructured data, not easily transcribed into traditional SQL databases.
Any basic archiving product will be searchable and provide indisputable evidence but an excellent archiving provides an intelligent, user-friendly search interface and more importantly, does not compromise on the speed of search as the data repository of a business grows indefinitely. In other words, performance over time becomes a critical aspect of an archiving solution.
Solar Archive
Businesses of all sizes are benefitting from Solar Archive, a performance-centric email archiving solution grounded in a technology that is continuously renewed and optimized by market demands for over 17 years. The pride of the solution lies within the proprietary indexing architecture that offers fast and unaffected search performance regardless of email data growth.
Solar Archive is a white-label email archiving solution that allows cloud service providers to deliver compliant and secure archiving that will delight their customers, whilst benefitting from our premium recurring margins.
Get in touch to find out how to start a conversation with your customers about email archiving and what the margins look like for you as a provider.