Email archiving vs. email backup: What to use and when

Every business is constantly communicating both within and outside their organization. This constant influx of emails creates an enormous volume of data, and the nature of these emails is highly sensitive and confidential.

Their confidential nature has led to emails being the target of many attacks. Approximately 94% of organizations experienced security incidents in 2023. These most commonly happen in the form of cyberattacks where attackers withdraw owners' access to their email accounts and blackmail the organization into shelling out money. In other cases, organizations could lose their access to email data because it’s corrupted, it’s been deleted accidentally or intentionally, or even when email servers are affected by natural or man-made disasters.

These issues can affect any organization, so it's better to be prepared to deal with them without significant disruption to your business. Email archiving and email backup are two commonly used services that can help with comprehensive and well-rounded email management. In this article, we’ll take a look at what email archiving and backup are, the ways in which they differ, and which one to pick for your business needs.

What is email archiving?

Email archiving is a hierarchical and systematic process in which emails are stored in a secure server and can be retrieved using advanced search capabilities. Email data can be requested for a variety of reasons, such as ongoing litigation or compliance with industry regulations. While most organizations are mandated to archive their data because of the industry and jurisdiction they’re in, it’s important to have an archiving service in place because it can help with mailbox storage management, legal issues, eDiscovery, and more. Let's look at some of the key objectives of archiving email. 

Key objectives of archiving emails

Long-term retention

Many common regulations, such as HIPAA and GLBA, mandate that organizations retain their email data for a minimum of seven years. One of the main objectives of archiving email is that the data must be retained for a long time, usually spanning years or even decades. Because organizations may require email data from many years prior, it's always best to retain important email data even though it might be outdated.

Searchability of data

Email data being easily accessible is one of the core reasons why email archiving is preferred for older emails. In most email archiving services, robust search functionalities are a common feature. The search feature allows for looking up specific emails or attachments based on granular criteria such as sender address, date, email content, and subject to help users narrow down and spot the exact email they're looking for. This way, admins can respond to legal enquiries without much hassle.

Legal and regulatory compliance

Educational institutions are expected to adhere to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which mandates that emails be retained for at least five years. Similarly, healthcare institutions need to comply with HIPAA regulations, which states that emails must be mandated for a minimum of seven years. According to the regulations, emails should be stored in a tamper-proof, easily accessible format. Email archiving allows for such storage in a secure, immutable server. This provides the adherence to industry and region-specific regulations.

Storage reduction

With years’ worth of emails accumulating over time, the amount of storage required and the load on your email provider keeps increasing exponentially. One of the core expectations of organizations as they keep growing is to retain emails in a secure environment without adding too much pressure on the email server. Email archiving solutions provide such a space. Admins can simply choose to archive older emails and remove them from their email provider. This way, a secure copy of the email is always available, without any additional load on your email provider.

Retention policy management

While retaining emails is important for various reasons, not every old email is vital enough to be retained. With email archiving solutions, you can define policies specific to different roles, departments, and seniority, and filter the emails that are archived based on several other criteria. Similarly, you can set up retention policies based on the regulations that you need to comply with. This lets you manage all of the required data in one place without the need for repeated manual intervention.

What is email backup?

An email backup takes a snapshot of your entire email database at specific points in time. Data such as content, attachments, and dates will be captured and saved as part of the backup in a location other than the primary email storage. Email backups are particularly useful when emails have been lost because of data corruption, hardware or software failures, cyberattacks, server corruption, natural disasters, or other unforeseen circumstances. In these cases, the data from the backup is restored to the primary email provider to ensure smooth functioning of the business.

Key objectives of email backup

Data protection

Email data could be the subject of attacks that are either intentional or unintentional. The importance of this data makes it necessary to be protected from any tampering, corruption, or deletion. Despite all of the security measures in place, the data can be lost due to a variety of reasons. These include cyberattacks, hardware failures, deletion by employees, and more. To protect your email data from being lost forever, an email backup solution needs to be deployed. Email backups give a point-in-time copy of email data and restore the emails to their original state in case the original emails are deleted.

Disaster recovery

On-premise email providers store the email data in secure hardware servers. However, these physical servers aren’t immune to catastrophic natural disasters such as fires, floods, and other calamities. Backup servers are usually maintained in different geographical locations from the original email data. This ensures that even if your primary email server is affected, the data from the backup server can be reinstated, providing uninterrupted service for your organization.

Quick restoration

When an organization has lost access to its email data, it's crucial that they regain access at the earliest. Additionally, it needs to be restored to that exact state at which the users lost access. An effective email backup solution must be able to do this with minimal effort, and it should provide advanced controls with features to reinstate data to the exact state and set of mailboxes that had their data tampered with. These features will help admins and users get immediate access to their emails back without any significant disruption to the business.

Incremental backup

Email data is backed up at specific frequencies according to the configuration. Saving all of the required data over and over again only increases the load on the server. Email backup solutions perform incremental backups. This means that only the additions and modifications made to the email data since the last backup will be copied. These backup windows are kept small to ensure that there's not a huge overhead while backing up the data. The small backup window also helps with minimizing how much data is lost in case of data corruption or deletion.

The core differences between archiving and backup

Even though backup and archiving are used interchangeably in many contexts, they vary from one another in more ways than one. While at their core, both backup and archiving are used to safeguard email data, the methods in which data is stored, the functionalities offered, and the reason for which each is used differ. Let's take a look at the aspects in which they vary so that you can make an informed choice about which one serves your requirement.

Intention

 Email archiving 

Email archiving is done with the intention of retaining data for a long period of time for legal and compliance purposes. The data is indexed and stored in an organized format, providing for search and retrieval of required data whenever required.

 Email backup 

Email backup is done with the intention of storing data for a short term. The data in an email backup is used to restore it to its original state in case there’s been an incident of data loss. The duplicate copies of emails maintained in the backup help with data protection and email management.

Duration

Email archiving 

Email archives are maintained for years. Older emails that users don't need in their mailboxes anymore are pushed into the archive. Emails in the archive are meant for long-term storage, and the storage period is determined by various factors.

 Email backup 

Email backups are meant for short-term retention. The data in an email backup gets updated in frequent intervals to help with data recovery at specific times.

Storage management

Email archiving 

If certain emails in the email provider are not constantly needed, they can be moved to the archiving solution to free up storage. Since email archiving solutions deploy better storage optimization techniques, this helps with better storage management.

 Email backup 

An email backup is merely a copy of the email data. So, the data isn’t deleted from the primary email server, and there's no storage optimization done because the objective is to maintain data for recovery purposes.

Accessibility

Email archiving 

Email archiving solutions are designed with advanced search capabilities. Emails can be quickly retrieved based on any conditions, such as subject, content, or attachment, and this helps satisfy the eDiscovery requirements that might be imposed on an organization in times of any ongoing legal issues.

 Email backup 

Email backups aren’t indexed very effectively since they’re simply copies of the email data. Locating a particular email and retrieving or exporting it is a much harder process than it is with email archiving solutions.

Compliance

Email archiving 

Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) mandate organizations to store their emails in an immutable and organized manner. Email archiving solutions are designed to comply with industrial regulations.

 Email backup 

Email backup solutions focus primarily on data protection and restoration in cases of corruption, deletion, or disasters. They don’t focus on the preservation of data as mandated by regulatory bodies.

Audit

Email archiving 

Email archives are regularly looked up by org admins to retrieve specific emails or export them. All actions performed in the archiving portal are sensitive because it might be the only copy of certain emails. Every action in the archiving portal is audited with precision.

 Email backup 

Because the purpose of email backup solutions is to maintain a snapshot of emails and restore them to the email provider if needed, the actions aren’t audited in as much detail as with archiving solutions.

Frequency

 Email archiving 

Data is captured by email archiving solutions in real-time. Every email that's received or sent is simultaneously routed or journaled into the archiving service, making all of the data readily available.

 Email backup 

Backup solutions conduct checks for new data at specific frequencies. There could be a small timeframe in which data isn’t backed up. So, if data happens to get corrupted before the backup window, it may end up getting lost forever.

Which one should you choose?

Email archiving solutions can be used for the long-term retention of data, whereas backup services are used when data needs to be restored following corruption or deletion from the primary email provider. If your emails need to be searched for retrieval and stored for a long term, an email archiving solution with eDiscovery will be a good fit. On the other hand, if your primary objective is disaster recovery and data protection, an email backup solution will be better suited to meet your requirements.

Wrapping up

For well-rounded and comprehensive email management, both email backup and email archiving solutions need to be used in tandem. When used together, an email backup solution can provide quick restoration in case emails are corrupted. The email archiving service can capture emails in real time to ensure that they don’t go missing when there's a service disruption to the email provider before the next backup window. Using both solutions together offers both restoration and retrieval capabilities for your organization, securing your emails from all possible forms of deletion and attacks.