E-mail Message Archiver

One of the most important components for any businesses networking is an E-mail Message Archiver.  These are very important to any businesses integrity as they store any and all e-mails.

This can the be the biggest factor between an expensive and costly lawsuit and one in which you spend few resources finding key information that has already been stored and is on file.

Edited by alexjsolis - Dec/14/2007 at 3:49pm

Keep in mind backups alone are not sufficient to comply with any type of mail archival requirements.  Backups are essentially a snapshot of your e-mail at one moment in time.  They do not record messages removed from the deleted items folder.  Also any message that is sent and then removed from the sent items folder before a backup is run is never backed up and there is no record of said message, likewise any interoffice message sent, then deleted, during the course of a day that does not get backed up, is also never recorded.

Assuming you have to comply with a request for someone’s e-mail from the last 2 years, obviously the data on a backup tape from 2 years ago would not be sufficient, nor would a backup tape from the night before due to messages being removed from the deleted / sent items folders etc.  Also with Backup Exec you can only restore a mailbox to the same mailbox, which is fine for restoring backups, but the process you would need to go through to retrieve all messages possible from the last 2 years (assuming you have tapes going back 2 years) would be a monumental undertaking of restoring from many tapes and archiving the data to PST or some other type of data.  (Not to mention the number of duplicate messages you would have to deal with)

 

Edited by Josh Van Cleave - Apr/04/2008 at 9:01am