The Difference Between an Archive and a Backup

Ask a hundred IT people to define Backup and Archive and you'll be surprised how many different, conflicting definitions you get. Many see the two as synonomous while others consider an Archive to be the result of a Backup. Without common definitions and clear distinctions how can we as a community achieve break-through technological advances? If we can't define the terms clearly how are we going to communicate effectively with not-so-technical stakeholders like corporate executives?

Here's how Yahoo defines an Archive: A long-term storage area, often on magnetic tape, for backup copies of files or for files that are no longer in active use. No wonder we're having such difficulty finding common ground. In my opinion, the best way to understand (and communicate) the difference between a Backup and an Archive is by emphasizing their different outcomes. In a nutshell, the purpose of an Archive is information accessibility while the purpose of a Backup is business recovery.

Along these lines, Wikipedia offers a pretty good distinction...

Archive refers to a collection of records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept. In computing, an archive is a file containing many other files.

Backup in computer engineering refers to the copying of data for the purpose of having an additional copy of an original source. If the original data is damaged or lost, the data may be copied back from that source, a process which is known as Data recovery or Restore. The "data" in question may be either data as such, or stored program code, both of which are treated the same by the backup software.

For what it's worth, here are my definitions of the two:

Archive: A user-accessible repository of information that is not confined by the age of its content.

Backup: A snapshot of files and data that can restore a system to a previous operational state.

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