What online archiving is and is not

10. Jun, 2009 0 Comments

Online storage has been available for quite a while. Aren’t picture album sharing websites a data type specific archive? Organizing online pictures into albums, couldn’t that be a form of tagging data for discovery? The answer… Ah no, but you could make the case that it’s an example of archive copy. You could also say that it’s a one time online backup.

So here is what I think of when talking about archiving. When I was a teenager I worked for the North American Medical Archives (NMA). It was there that I learned the ins and outs of archiving in the pure sense. At NMA we provided an offsite warehouse to store medical records, X-ray film, and other medical documents. We also provided daily retrieval services from the archive. The need for a Medical Records archiving comes from regulations on Medical Records retention that says hospitals need to keep them for 5 years. This can be costly to do onsite at a hospital; so herein lies the need for an offsite warehouse.

Any of this sound familiar to backup? Well, there is a difference here. NMA is an example of where the primary copy is sent offsite to an archive and then purged after 5 years. Backup tape offsiting is, and should be considered a different beast. To put it in other words, BACKUP IS NOT ARCHIVING AND SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR ARCHIVING. With backup there is no definitive copy. In fact each day’s backup could produce a different version of a file. Backup provides a level of data protection that allows us to protect against a wide range of “what if” scenarios that can arise when data is readily available for daily use. Archiving, on the other hand, describes storing data at rest (not changing) on secondary storage (possibly tape). The addition of an offsite facility is just another layer of protection but not a necessary component of archiving.

Here are some examples of online data protection tools and providers.

Adrive

Xdrive

Box.net

Clip2Net

Drop.io

DropBoks

Mozy

The LinkUp.

-James Brissenden, GlassHouse Senior Consultant, Storage and Data Protection