DoSTOR June,27 2008--You're reading analysis on misunderstanding of China Storage users series: Report 2 Confusion around Archiving and Backup.

Many users believe that it's no need to archive files if they have backed up all the data. And they backup data instead of archiving.

According to SNIA, archiving is to copy or move data for purposes of retention; to create an collection of data that is maintained as a long-term record of a business, application, or information state. Archives are typically kept for auditing, regulatory, analysis or reference purposes. Generally, archiving is for auditing or analysis, rather than recovery. After archiving, the original files will be deleted.

SNIA defines backup as a collection of data stored on (usually removable) non-volatile storage media for purposes of recovery in case the original copy of data is lost or becomes inaccessible. Also called backup copy. To be useful for recovery, a backup must be made by copying the source data image when it is in a consistent state.

Thus archiving is used to store data for a long time, and may be used for auditing. While backup, should be a data protection to deal with the possible system failures or data loss and other issues.

Essencially, backup is to provide short-term insurance policies to the implementation of disaster recovery tasks, while archiving is specifically designed to search information quickly from a span of several decades of mails, business records and files (file Level).

Archiving data rarely change, so can be store once. And you can set deadlines for reservation; data for backup protection is active data always changing.

Therefore, it's still a long way to go for vendors and media to help Chinese users implementing backup and archiving reasonably.