There is usually a lot of confusion as to what an archive is and what a backup is. A backup application usually takes regularly scheduled copies of production data in order to provide a reliable method of recovering files, email, documents or any other type of object that may have been deleted, lost or destroyed. Most backups are retained for a limited time frame as subsequent backups supersede previous ones. In other words, a backup is designed as a short-term insurance policy to facilitate disaster recovery.
An archive on the other hand, is deployed to provide continuous and rapid access to years of information and intellectual property. Unlike backups, that
create duplicate copies of data, an email archiving solution removes a single instance of a particular object from a production environment, based on a policy definition,
and then subsequently moves it to a storage system designed for long-term retention of that object. Backups are used to ensure business continuity, and companies usually deploy different backup models that either create snapshots or duplicate information onto removable media. Archiving is much more complex. As information moved from a production environment to archive storage using specialized email storage software, it is tagged and then indexed for search usually in support of roles based access or legal discovery.