Email Backup vs. Email Archive – Which Works Best?

When it was invented in 1972, no one could predict that email would become as popular as it is today. With over 100 billion emails sent every day in the entire world, it is the most popular form of communication, for personal and business affairs. As the number of emails grows, so do concerns about security. The two most common solutions are email archiving and email backup. Let’s delve into email backup vs. email archive and which works best for you.

Email Backup vs. Archiving

Let’s get the technicalities out of the way first. Email backup is exactly what it means – creating backup copies of existing emails. These are stored on external sources, with the main purposes of having access in case the actual emails get deleted or hacked. Email archiving also stores a version of your mail, but only for a certain time period. These two may sound seemingly similar, but there are crucial differences between them, which we will outline below.

Email Backup in Detail

One of the easiest ways to do email backup is to have scheduled backups, where emails from your database are downloaded to a device.
The good side of email backup – you get an externally stored version of your emails which can be accessed at any point in time.
The bad side of email backup – the email copies are exactly the same in size and you double the space you’re using for email. For a single user, that may not be that big of a deal, but a company with hundreds of employees can end up spending a lot of money on backup storage.

Email Archive in Detail

On the other hand, email archive does not entail that whole emails are copied and backed up. Archiving means that emails are stored in real time, so that your organization has a copy of everything a user sends or receives in a certain time frame.
The key aspect of email archiving is that it only contains emails from a certain time frame. Everything falling outside of this time period is either permanently deleted or moved to an external source.

Backup vs. Archiving – Which is Better for You?

Email archiving works well if you only need to store emails from one time period. It is a great solution if you want to satisfy law or company regulations in regards to your emails. On the other hand, email backup is the better solution as your data will be fully backed up at all times. However, there is the problem of doubling your storage data.
But what if we told you that you could have email backup that does not take up tons of data? BackupMail is a great service that allows you to back up all your email in the cloud. All of your mail is safe on an external location in the cloud and it can be accessed at any point in time. You satisfy company regulations, your emails are safe and you don’t waste any additional space. BackupMail allows you to have email backups without any of its drawbacks – it’s a no brainer!