Backup and archiving are two critical functions that virtually all Novell GroupWise-enabled organizations should deploy in order to protect the data and information that their messaging and network infrastructures support. Sound backup and archiving policies – including the infrastructure necessary to support these policies – are critical elements of any organization’s risk management strategy.

However, backup and archiving are actually quite different processes, involving different capabilities and often with competing requirements. Backing up data creates a snapshot of corporate information at a given point in time (hopefully, of the state of information from the previous night). In other words, backing up is a process that creates a “reserve” resource, a guarantee that the original data can be recovered should something happen to it.

Archiving, on the other hand, applies to data that is likely to be needed again. In that sense, archiving should be viewed as intelligent management of corporate data that addresses not only the need to preserve it for a given time period, but also logically storing the information on media where it is easily accessible, searchable and retrievable for future use.