Archiving Avoids Email Panic
For most people, inadvertently deleting or losing an important email causes panic. Unfortunately, unless you have a true email archiving system in place, digging up a specific email from a normal backup is, at best, a hit-and-miss proposition.
The key concept to understand is that that an archive and a backup are not the same thing. An email backup is simply a snapshot of the status of an email system at a specific point in time. If the backup is performed daily at a specified time, and an email was received and deleted between backups, it's never been backed up and is therefore unrecoverable.
Even if it was backed up, chances are high you'll never be able locate it as it would take days of a technician's time to search and restore the range of backup files. Why is the process so time consuming? Most email systems save the email messages inside a single mailbox file or database - before you can identify what messages are in a backup file, the entire mailbox file or database must be restored. It's unlikely you'll remember the exact date and time the message might have been in your account, so to find that message, you'll need to restore the daily backup set for every day you thought the message was saved in your account. The reality is that searching for a message in backup files is akin to looking for a needle in a warehouse full of haystacks.
These are the three most common situations when a message won't be caught in a standard backup process:
- Incoming messages that are received, read, then deleted before the daily backup snapshot is taken
- Outgoing messages that are sent but not saved and retained in a Sent Items folder
- Incoming messages that are downloaded to a desktop email program or mobile device and automatically removed from the server (e.g. POP clients)
There is no substitute for making a regular daily backup copy of the entire email system - in case of equipment failure or theft, the email system and user messages can be restored to the same state they were before the problem (here at Norada we do full backups twice per day).
Email archiving systems that capture all the activity in users' accounts are generally too expensive for small businesses to consider. Norada solves this problem by providing an inexpensive email archiving service that records all the transactional activity in a user's account - just like a flight-data-recorder does in an aircraft. Every incoming and outgoing message, and every attachment, is recorded in a separate file. At the end of each month, those files are moved to a DVD and sent to our customer for permanent safe storage.
Adding emailing archiving to your Solve360 subscription effectively means you can keep all your email and all your attachments forever. If you need to produce an important email - no matter when, no matter what the reason - it's at your fingertips even if it's no longer in your inbox.
More information on Norada's unique archiving solution for small business is available here.
