Archiving Archiving, on the other hand, is the retention of data for lengthy periods, usually years, sometimes decades, and moves the data from its primary location. “Backup is for restoring a file, object, database, volume or system based on some recovery time objective and recovery point objective, whereas the archive is a picture of the data and its state at a point in time.” key characteristics of archiving systems. These include: “Indexing and metadata management for search, replication, cloning, secure shred, Worm (write-once read-many), along with compliance or regulatory items.” In addition, archiving includes movement of data off production storage systems onto the archive medium, driven by retention policies. “Data mover tools may be tightly or loosely integrated with the destination or target devices and in some cases even have overlapping features. The third component which does not attract as much awareness is the most important, however – how the data mover tools integrate with different applications, which need to be configured to use rules or policies to archive the data, or present it to the data mover. Another element of the distinction can also be the medium. Media used for backup need to be able to ingest vast quantities of data quickly during a limited time window. As a result, disk rather than tape has increasingly been used for the added performance it provides, as well as providing faster access times to recently backed-up data. Archives, on the other hand, have increasingly become tape-based, which offers the advantage of being cheap and robust over long periods of time, while the fairly slow speed of recovery is rarely a problem as occurrences are rare.