I must admit that I am surprised about the number of benefits email archiving has to offer. It has taken me three posts to cover everything I encountered during my research. This is the last article about the benefits; in the next posts I will write about the features that are important for email archiving products.

Disaster recovery

An email archiving solution can’t replace conventional backups. For disaster recovery you will still require a backup of the complete database. However, if you are responsible for backups in your organizations, you know how unreliable they are. Thus, if the latest backup of the email database is corrupt, you at least have a copy of all emails. After you have reinstalled your email server, you can restore emails from the archive to the email database. I think you will sleep much better, if you know that emails are secured at two different locations. Furthermore, during the disaster recovery process users will still have access to their old emails through the email archiving system.

Storage costs

Storage costs are falling continuously. But the amount of data on our servers is growing at the same pace. A considerable amount of storage capacity is obviously needed to store email with attachments for ten years or more. Some email archiving solutions store only a single instance of an attachment if the same file has been sent to multiple mailboxes. Because attachments usually occupy the most space, this can save a substantial amount of storage capacity.

The cheapest storage media are still tapes. Thus, costs will be reduced if you can move old emails to a tape library. As I outlined in my previous post, backup software is not really suitable for archiving tasks. If you want end users to be able to search and restore emails, then you need an email archiving tool. Enterprise email archiving solutions can be configured to move older emails automatically to cheap media. End users can search for emails no matter which medium has been used to store them. Of course, restoring emails from tapes will take longer than from hard disk. However, this is usually not an issue for very old emails because they will be restored less often.

Streamline migrations and upgrades

You can also benefit from email archiving whenever you have to migrate an email system to a new server or upgrade your email backend software. Modern email systems allow you to do such maintenance work without going offline. For example, with Exchange, you can just set up a second server and move all mailboxes to the new location. However, if you have a huge Exchange database, this can take a considerable amount of time. Because email archiving solutions store old emails in a different database, your Exchange database will be considerably smaller. Hence, maintenance tasks can be performed much faster, with a lower risk for failures.

Reduced risk of database corruption

If you have ever experienced a corrupted Exchange database, you will surely acknowledge that any method that reduces the risk of this happening again is welcome. Even if you have a relatively new backup system, you will always lose some emails; not to mention the downtime. Storing old emails in an email archiving database keeps your email server’s database lean, which significantly reduces the risk of corruptions. Furthermore, integrity checking and defragmenting the database are a great deal quicker. Thus, you can perform such maintenance tasks more frequently, which also reduces the risk of database corruption. Moreover, you will have less worry that something will go wrong while your maintenance tasks are running.

Email server performance

An email archiving solution costs performance because emails have to be transferred continuously to the email archiving system. However, a small database will certainly also improve the performance of your email server. In addition, since end users can use the email archiving system to search for emails, your email server’s workload will be notably smaller. Especially, if your archiving policy assures that all new emails are copied to the archive immediately after their arrival. In this case, all user-based search operations will only run on the email archiving system, which reduces the load on your email server.

Do you know of other email archiving benefits? Please, let us know.