Another key issue: whose task is it to administer email archiving policies? Most organizations will have email administrators who manage everything associated with email. While it is up to these people to enforce and manage archiving operations, often they are not in charge of setting retention policy.

Then there are ongoing backup operations that are usually carried out by storage administrators. This operation is horizontal and right across the organization which means backups of email will occur in addition to archiving.

This is normal practice and acceptable for most organizations, but problems arise when the two operations are not aligned. If archived email is set to be deleted after six months, what happens to the backed up copy of the email?

Burton notes that this causes problems when the user or administrator thinks certain records have been deleted, but remain in the backup files. "Also, if you want to retrieve an email, do users go to the archiving guys or the backup guys?" asked Burton.

Backup versus archiving