Well said, Adam. Much more elegantly put than how I was about to describe it.
Incidentally, this underscores an incredibly important topic (and my new pet peeve) -- common glossary. Backup and Archive HAVE to have separate, discrete definitions not just for the sake of discussion between interested parties, but as part of compliance requirements. I see this all the time, surrounding discussions about IT Quality (with respect to "CFR 21 Part 11 compliance") -- if everyone isn't using the same glossary, 'bad things happen.' Another facet of data archival is the audit trail -- which can describe in great detail the creation and decommissioning of that data. And nothing can be deleted before the data retention period expires. Typically, backup policies specifically state that these copies of data are "convenience copies" for disaster recovery - and would generally not go further back than 30 days, to maintain a stark contrast with the retention of data in archives, which can go for years. You could have a backup every day, as long as the contents of that backup expired after 30 days. Archives are usually reserved for data that is fixed, closed and not to be changed. For example, I work with data that has to be held for 15 years from the date of expiration of the last vial on a shelf. Now you're talking about procurement, production and sales records in the SAP system's databases, design records in Word documents, flat files in proprietary data formats from spectrum analyzers... a whole constellation of ordered and unordered data that needs to be synchronized to some future event. Another facet is part of legal compliance -- not only do the lawyers want to be assured they can quickly search through indexed data as needed for due diligence research, they also want to be assured that convenience records (email) don't hang around forever. This is a huge topic... and for fun there's also consideration of backups for the archives. One ECM I'm familiar with is Windream (http://www.windream.com/en/home.html) -- the business defines lifecycle rules for the data, and the system takes care of enforcing those rules, maintaining audit trails, etc. Mike On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Adam Levin <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
