While often confused, backup and archive serve different purposes: Backup:
Creates copies of active data for recovery purposes
Data remains in primary location
Short to medium-term retention
Focus on business continuity Archive:
Moves infrequently accessed data to long-term storage
Data is removed from primary location
Long-term retention (years or decades)
Focus on compliance and storage optimization Example: Email backup keeps copies of current emails for quick recovery, while email archiving moves old emails to cheaper storage for compliance purposes.
Rewriting in plainer words…
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