Q: When you archive, aren't you just saving everything?

• Author: Hearn, Jill
• Position: HAVE A BURNING RIM QUESTION? ASK THE EXPERT! Archiving - Brief article

There's a common misconception that data backups are indeed archives. Let's take a minute to review the differences.

Backups are secondary copies of active production information used when a recovery copy is needed to get an end user back to work or, in the case of a disaster, to get the business back up and running. Since backups are focused on constantly changing business information, they are generally short-term and often overwritten--say, monthly--when full backups are taken. This makes backup a poor choice for retaining data for compliance reasons.

An archive, on the other hand, is not a copy of production data, but rather the primary...