Nowadays, setting an important archiving strategy is considered mandatory for most organizations. As a matter of fact, 21st century introduced an extreme growth of data that cannot be left unmanaged.
“Archiving” is usually confused with “data backups” which help in restoring lost, destroyed, or even corrupted data. Keeping that in mind, what is meant by “data archiving”?
This article will define exactly “data archiving”, why is it so important when it comes to effective business, and how can an archiving plan be improved effectively?
Data Archiving Definition
Two types of data exist the data that is accessed frequently and the data that is no longer used regularly but still important for future reference or regulatory compliance. That being said, archiving manages the second type of data and moves it to a different storage device.
File archiving is an important mechanism to perfectly manage and index archives in order to make the process of retrieving files or any parts of files easier. Therefore, archiving is considered the best solution for managing data capacity rather than improving primary storage performance.
Data Archiving Importance
As mentioned above, archiving data is an important process for successful and valuable businesses. However, many organizations are still reluctant to set an archiving strategy due to the fact that they are uncertain of how to manage the archiving process. To illustrate, these organizations are unable to differentiate between the data that must be archived for future reference, and the one that must be left on primary storage.
On that premise, deciding which data must be archived and setting an effective archiving strategy, must be considered of high priority in most businesses to avoid losing inactive data of high value and more expensive to recreate than to archive.
A good example, in this case, is DNA sequencing, in fact, the first human genome took 13 years and approximately one billion dollars to be sequenced; however, today intakes almost 2 days and less than $1,500 to sequence a human genome.
In addition to lowering data costs and easily accessing old valuable data, archiving is considered important for better primary storage performance and easily performing a backup on its data.
Effective Archiving Strategy
Modern organizations, enterprises, and businesses hold billions of files and data in their storage. Therefore, an effective archive strategy must include the following features and procedures:
- Ready-to-archive data can be effectively managed by administrators through setting policies and measures to process this data automatically (snapshotting, moving, verifying, etc.)
- Efficiently moving data from the primary storage is necessary when it comes to archiving high volumes of data.
- Implementing fast search and restore process is mandatory for administrators to research and retrieve any archived data quickly and efficiently.
- Data learning and insights (i.e. logging activity, user access, etc.) is important in any organization and its administrators to analyze how much and how effectively the old data is actually used.
- To simplify the process of backing up data, implementing internal data protection is necessary to back-up the archives along with other data and not separately.
- Access to primary storage and archives must be managed separately.
Conclusion
To conclude, data archiving is no doubt an important process when it comes to managing old and valuable data whether in scientific organizations, businesses, or any other type of firms. Old data related to historical scientific researches can no doubt add value to modern science-based organizations or projects. The same case applies to any kind of vast businesses or firms.
Therefore, data management is important to avoid losing data, make access to it faster and easier, and avoid high costs of its recreation.
