Why You Need To Save Your Data.
Archiving data is the key to operating a business. It can track what has occurred, and support or help to resolve any unforeseen issues that might happen in the future. Archived data is rarely overwritten and it is highly recommended not to be able to do so. The ability to archive data has been available for years and is either stored on-site or at a data center. Archived data differs from backup data in the respect that archive data is consists of primary copies of the data being stored, rather than secondary copies.
Archive data is often accessed over the internet via a GUI program like a web browser. The archive is intended for the storage of data that doesn't need to be immediately accessible, but which may be needed at some point in the future. Magnetic tape storage provides a low cost archive option, but it is also a volatile medium that can be easily damaged during handling, can be worn, and must be stored with proper environmental conditions to reduce the risk of data loss. Any archive using magnetic tape should be carefully monitored and exercised, and the data needs to be periodically refreshed on new reels.
It's important to determine whether or not it's worth the time and money to archive data for your business is to determine the return on investment (ROI). However, not all returns are this significant, or the decision to archive the data so obvious. For example, if your budget only supports $5,000 worth of archiving activity, then data with the greatest ROI should be archived first, working your way down the ROI ranking, until your budget is exhausted. Moving your archive data to a less expensive RAID system will help reduce acquisition cost, but it doesn't eliminate the backup overhead involved. All RAID archive systems use a volatile spinning magnetic media that must be protected from catastrophic disk failure, therefore making backups is essential. EMA has proven to be an affordable archiving solution and can be used with all major operating systems and email clients. EMA is normally compatible with existing email clients and operating systems.
The archive, as explained before, is the storage on slower and less accessible media of data that are not needed to be immediately accessible. Archive data is often placed on lower-cost storage than critical backup data, such as magnetic backup tape, CD, CD-R and DVD media. If your archive data is valuable to your business, you should never have only one copy at a single site. Although a secondary copy of archive data is usually created for disaster recovery protocols, this copy is usually only created once and is not be part of the daily and weekly backup process. Simply put, it is when archive data is no longer being actively stored is when you or your business could run into trouble.
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