Archiving

Many organisations make the mistake of retaining data backups and calling this an archive; when backup and archive have very distinct and separate requirements.

Backup provides recovery from unexpected data loss (user error, data corruption, hardware failure or theft) whereas an archive is a long-term store of inactive or low-activity data retained for future use.

Archives must provide additional features, such as security controls and locking of data for compliance, search functionality to query the archive, and options to expire and remove data based on policy or time controls. Alternatively, your archive may be just for historical data mining. Either way Mach One will build a system around your chosen parameters.

A simple way to view the difference is that backups are copies and archives are moves.