Data Backup or Data Archive: What your business needs?

In today’s business world, no organization irrespective of its size and industry is excluded from the government, legal, internal or competitive demands to store historical business data for a longer period of time. However, retaining a huge volume of old data comes with several challenges. One of the biggest challenges is how to do more with limited IT budgets. There are various storage solution providers offering a wide array of data storage products designed to meet regulatory requirements or internal retention policies.

When we talk about Salesforce data storage solutions, we have only a handful of vendors. However, wading through these solutions is becoming a strategic decision to take which can affect your ROI and even the powers to address regulatory or internal data retention policies. Choosing a solution which couldn’t fit into your business requirements can lead to untold obstacles down the road.

What are the options? Typically organizations go for either a data backup or an archiving solution. Backup & Archive: these two words are often used interchangeably but have very different meanings and purposes. Organizations usually look for highly scalable data archival solutions which can offer long-term data retention with the highest level of data security without compromising on-demand data accessibility. However, it is a myth that backup and archival solutions are moreover the same. Though both the methods are being used for safekeeping your business data, they both are different in many ways depending on business needs. Let’s discuss the difference between a typical data backup and an archiving solution.

Data Backup Vs Data Archival

Definition

To keep it simple, data backup is a “copy-paste” of your data while data archive is a “cut-paste”. A backup solution usually copies your original data and keep it inside the same storage, while an archive solution takes your entire historical data and offer an option to keep it in your preferred secondary storage system. Backup data is not the original data, while archived data is the original data.

Purpose

The purpose of backup and archival solutions are completely different. A backup solution is being used for disaster recovery, accidental data loss, and compliance. On the other hand, an archiving solution is being used to reduce data storage cost, perform analytics on data, and to meet compliance and audit requirements.

Also read: The Most Recommended Strategies for Data Loss Prevention in Salesforce

Retention Period

While data backup solutions are being used for short-term data retention, archival solutions are being used for long-term data retention.

Performance

As a backup solution keeps a copy of the original data inside the same storage system, this doesn’t serve the purpose of storage space optimization or storage cost reduction. A backup solution significantly drops the application performance, as the primary storage gets populated with more data. On the other side, an archiving solution keeps the original data in a secondary storage system by optimizing the primary storage space. This results in high application performance.

Cost

As we discussed above, a backup solution is not meant for storage cost savings, so the cost will increase periodically. While an archiving solution can significantly save data storage cost. A Salesforce data archiving solution like DataArchiva can save over 80% of your data storage cost.

Summary

Though data backup and archival solutions address different issues, it depends on your specific business needs to choose the best-suited option for your organization. If you are a Salesforce customer and had faced challenges managing your data growth and difficulties delineating between a backup and archiving solution, working with an archiving solution vendor who can manage your Salesforce data across its life-cycle can ease your process. As the ONLY Salesforce native data archiving solution, DataArchiva can periodically archive your historical data and save 80%+ data storage cost by efficiently addressing compliance and data retention requirements. Get in touch today!

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DataArchiva is an enterprise data management application built for Salesforce that offers complete data management solutions including archive, backup, and seeding.