Monthly Archives: December 2011

The lowdown on email backup vs archiving

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Discovery and recovery. This is the main difference between backing up your email and/or archiving it. But how do you choose whether you should just back up your emails or also archive them?

If you want to protect yourself against a major disaster like your office burning to the ground then back up is the way to go, provided you had the forethought not to backup on site! It’s also a great protection against human mistakes that result in lost or corrupted data. In a nutshell, backups involve making regular copies of your company’s emails and storing them in a secure location so you can recover your data should disaster strike.

But there are limitations to the backup option. It only stores copies of your emails for a limited time and these copies are mostly overridden, so if you want to hunt down an email from years ago, there’s a good chance it’s gone. A backup creates duplicates so it doesn’t actually help in reducing the amount of data you have stored on your server. If an email was sent to all 200 staff in your company, guess what? There are going to be 200 copies of that same email backed up. There are also no search capabilities so if you do have to hunt down an email, expect to spend hours or possibly even days looking for it.

Archiving was created to meet an increasing need for companies to be compliant and is much more versatile and user friendly than backups. Archiving software is designed to store emails long term and data isn’t overridden each time new copies are made. Forget trolling through countless emails looking for one in particular, as with archiving you can use key words to easily search for that vital email. This will come in handy when a solicitor’s letter comes across your desk and you need to dig up your email evidence in a hurry. The other great thing about archiving is it doesn’t duplicate, so it won’t put added pressure on your already precious storage space. Unlike backups, it saves just one copy of an email, no matter how many people it was sent to. Some archiving software like SD Archive actually frees up space on your server by reducing the size of your emails with a process called stubbing.

The biggest fan of archiving software is definitely the IT team, as once it is installed it operates independently, with little handholding required from the usually overstretched IT staff.

Does your company backup its email or archive it as well? Has archiving helped your business or has it made little difference? I would like to hear about your experiences.

Sources:

http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/downloads/White_Papers/BarracudaNetworks_WP_Email_Backup_and_Archiving.pdf


http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3050%2F31p50%2F31p50.asp


http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/DDA38125EE52836FCC25723E00071A25

The value of email

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A Nigerian prince wants your bank account details so he can wire your multimillion dollar inheritance to you. A pharmacy wants to sell you botox injections at a discounted rate.

Email can be annoying, there is no doubt about it. Spam clogging up your inbox, not to mention long email trails you have trouble following from colleagues who cc’ed you just because they can.

But is email still a valuable tool in the workplace? The CEO of a French IT company thinks not. Atos CEO Thierry Breton plans to get rid of internal emails within 18 months and communicate via instant messaging (IM) and social networks (you can read more about it here). He said the amount of data being generated is polluting our work environments and invading our personal lives. Fair point.

So has email become such a distraction that we should get rid of it all together? I think the question is best answered with another question. Could you live without your mobile phone or computer? Probably not. While they certainly can be distracting, they serve a purpose that isn’t possible with the humble landline phone and postal service.

There are plenty of negatives to communicating via email. They can be misinterpreted, they can go ‘missing’ in someone’s inbox, it is too easy to send an email to more people than is probably necessary and they can be distracting. But there are plenty of positives too. I like the fact that it gives you time to think about what you are going to say (something that isn’t as easy in the immediacy of a phone call or IM), it serves as a written reminder (it can be difficult to recall everything that was said in a conversation) and it makes it easy to reach people that would ordinarily be difficult to contact.

Mr Breton’s solution to the internal email quagmire is to use social networks. It will be interesting to see if this is effective. Social networks can be a great way to share information quickly but just like email, it is a tool that can be used for good or for bad. I’m sure we can all admit to wasting far too much time on Facebook or Twitter.

Whether your company communicates via email, social networks, IM, telephone or face-to-face, it’s more about how it is managed than the actual communication tool. All have their positives and negatives. It’s ultimately up to the individual company to decide what works best for them. If you have a chance, read over this debate on the effectiveness of email in the workplace- I’m sure you will find it as insightful as I did.

So lets open this up for discussion. How do you see email? Does it have a place in the workplace or is it just a complete time waster?