Archive vs Backup

Posted Tue, 06/22/2010 - 13:24 by admin

The other day I had one of those illuminating conversations. A friend of mine asked me about our new product, the YMi Librarian. 

I was ready! I mean, over the last month or two I have worked very hard to come up with a simple short sentence that describes the product -- my elevator pitch. Finally, I had a chance to use it.

I smiled broadly and said, “The YMiLibrarian is a data archive solution that lets you control, secure, verify, manage and track your stored data.”. 

He looked at me and said, “Oh, so you guys are doing backup.”

That stopped me cold. I quickly realized that he really didn’t get the difference between data backup and data archives.  

All the way home I pondered the difference between backup and archive and finally sat down to create a quick list about the difference:

Data Backup

Data Archive

Is used for immediate data restoration or disaster recovery

Is used for discovery purposes or long term storage of rarely used information

Can be altered

Is unalterable

Is a series of snapshots of active data

Comprises a historical collections of data with accessible information about that data

Is retained short term (days or weeks)

Is retained for the long term (years)
If you follow this logic you can only conclude that  yVolume technology is NOT a backup solution. It is  s most definitely an archive solution. It is a long term historical record that is unalterable and only brought back for important events such as discovery.

So now I am working on a new elevator pitch . . . I’ll keep you posted!