All of us want our precious memories stored in the form of photographs, videos and other media forms to be with us for many years to come. You may use data archiving as one of the methods to secure and store data for hoarding those memories for a long time. Not only that, data archiving is also essential in saving you from legal issues as it readily becomes evidence of anything that might have historically gone wrong in your company’s website.

There must be a well-planned policy to manage what to retain for a long time as holding onto everything (which isn’t useful) will also lead to drainage of information. Some archived data can have a read-only policy so as to prevent further modification while others can allow users to edit it. 

It’s different from backing up! 

Backing up data and archiving may seem similar, but it is not. A backup is a copy of regularly accessed data whereas an archive consists of data that you don’t regularly access like photographs or finished documents. An archive doesn’t have to be a part of the regularly backup system. Such archived data saves the cost of primary storage of a company as it is based on a low-performance, high-capacity storage system.

Ways to go - 

Archiving can be done in different forms. One of these is storing data online, which places archive data onto disk systems where it is readily accessible. Cloud storage, such as those offered by Amazon is an on-going investment but is inexpensive for archiving such data.

Keep your archived data, transparent. This allows the data to not only searchable but also makes it completely accessible and readable to other users whenever necessary so that they experience no change in behaviour. 

Make it offline 

Some archival systems use offline data storage where data is recorded on CD’s, pen drives, hard disks, and other formats. Since in this type of data archiving, data is not stored online, it is more vulnerable to theft and tampering. It consumes less power than disk systems, translating to lower costs. Unlimited data can be stored offline but accessing it years later can be a bit difficult as the format can be obsolete. Offline archiving can also be done on any removable media using data archiving software.

However, there is no way to predict which types of storage will stand the test of time. The best way is to go with the ones which provide you the best long-term support. 

Web archiving 

Imagine the blog on which you have invested long hours of efforts and thoughts, suddenly shuts down without any warning or your favourite websites are taken down due to domain expiry or any other technical issue! Heartbreaking, isn’t it? The websites are updated overtime or on the worst days hit by some harmful virus that can result in the drainage of your authentic content, what would you do then? How would you prove that all that matter was yours? 

Stillio is a cost-effective and efficient approach to store this data in its original form. It takes random screenshots of the website so that it can be easily viewed, shared and can be rightfully used as solid evidence in the times of crisis. Decide the frequency of archiving such data. It will depend on how many times the website updates. Just create an account on Stillio and your archiving would be on auto-pilot mode and you are all set! Here’s an amazing guide of web archiving: https://www.stillio.com/how-to-archive-website 

Retrieve it carefully 

An archive, over time, grows to a monolithic size. There has to be an efficient way to retrieve data when the need arises. It is simple to have the data on tape but those should be properly indexed. Some commercial archival products also provide a Web interface that simplifies the task of searching the archives of data. Getting the right data at the right time, in its proper form should be data archiving’s core purpose.