On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:25 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 6 Sep 2012, David Parter wrote: > > >> As many of us know, backups are not archives. Backups are for disaster >> recovery, archives are to preserve specific data for a specific period >> of time (perhaps "forever"). >> >
> I question your first statement that backups are not archives. why, how >> are they different? > > Backups and archives are two different things. Backups are for operational recovery. They protect your data from corruption or from accidental deletion. They are filesystem or OS-level. They are short term. Archives are for data retention and compliance. They are long term, and require application information about what stored them and how to retrieve them *in a readable format*. They are also contextual -- you need metadata and indexing to be able to find and retrieve the appropriate data. If you try to use standard backup systems for archival purposes, they will fail. They don't give you the ability to index or store metadata, the catalogs will become unwieldy in a short amount of time because they don't scale well over time, and just because you retrieve the file doesn't mean you can read it. They also don't guarantee data immutability, nor do they guarantee data usability. An archiving system is more than just long term retention of files. If your company has over 120,000 tapes in storage because somebody thinks that backups are the same thing as archives, I dare anyone to retrieve the correct and complete set of information when a lawsuit is filed and the plaintiff demands discovery on your archival data. Archives are a business application. The business needs to define what should be stored, how it needs to be indexes, how it needs to be accessed and how it needs to be recovered. Backups are an administrative/infrastructure application. Backups are for when a user says, "Oops! I accidentally deleted my mail folder." Archives are for when the scientists say, "I need to re-run the sequence from three years ago from sample-set alpha-7" or when the lawyers say, "We need every email from the past 7 years that was sent or received by our CFO and mentioning our company stock." Now, granted it may be that when someone asks for an archive, they really mean a backup, or vice versa. It'll depend on the requirements. -Adam
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