For starters, many companies don't back up their email and the ones that do usually find out when it's too late that their email archives only go back a year or two. That's usually because emails are typically deleted from the servers on which they are stored during routine tape maintenance rotation. And even if they keep those tape reels, magnetic tape is not a very reliable long-term storage medium. Tape has a short shelf life. It gets brittle with age. It can become demagnetized or just wear out in a few short years. Or it can just simply break. Too often a company needs to retrieve emails to substantiate their position in a lawsuit only to discover that those important documents are history. Then there's the issue of finding the document in the first place even if you actually have it stored somewhere. Finding emails and other critical files on old tapes can literally take hundreds of hours and cost you a fortune in the human resources you'll need to locate them. There's got to be a better way to keep your long-term backups on something that will last for decades, store it on some kind of media that won't fill a warehouse and let you find whatever you may need in a few short moments. There is. It's from Primera Technology and it's called the OptiVault. The device that is the OptiVault was actually born as something entirely different. Primera is known for their automated CD and DVD duplication devices such as the Bravo XR. It's a marvel to watch it in operation. A little robotic arm lifts a disc from its stack and delivers it first to a media burner drive, then removes and delivers it to the unit's high-quality full color printer that prints the images directly onto the disc's printable surface. Finally it deposits the completed disc to the finished stack. The clever people at Primera realized that with the proper software, this amazing little device could be turned into the perfect optical archival system. Using a customized version of the award-winning backup software EMC Dantz Retospect, emails and other critical files are automatically archived on optical media according to customizable scripts. Each disc is also printed with a unique serial number that helps identify and locate a single disk from its backup set to which it belongs. This is an exclusive feature of OptiVault which makes for fast and easy cataloging and retrieval. And since the OptiVault is fully automated from start to finish, it makes it an ideal archival system for small to medium-sized businesses that may not have a full-time IT department. OptiVault uses non-erasable, non-rewritable media. This is critical so that whatever data you may present in a court of law will be acceptable because it cannot be altered in any way. This Write Once Read Many or WORM specification complies with government regulations that deal with such matters. A full backup set of 25 discs offer a capacity of up to 117 uncompressed gigabytes or 234 GB of compressed data. This gives you more than enough room for every email plus attachments generated by hundreds of typical users per month. Show this article to the person in charge of your computers. They¹ll want to know that you can archive and backup emails and other important files not only from the server, but also from networked client computers running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris and Netware. OptiVault backs up and quickly recovers all emails that are sent, received or deleted through Microsoft Exchange, including attachments. It operates unobtrusively in the background of your Exchange server, reliably backing up all emails on optical media. Anyone who has used Retrospect will tell you that finding those important documents and emails will be a snap. Retrospect uses a sophisticated indexing system that lets you drill down to whatever you may be searching for via a system of easy to navigate search queries. Finally, Primera makes available special optical media discs that hold onto their data for over fifty years making them ideal for use in the OptiVault. Primra's TuffCoat Archival Media is a printable DVD that comes packaged in clear 50-disc holders that can be stacked for convenient storage. The OptiVault sits on a table or can be rack-mounted and comes with an integrated blue light that makes it easy to see its operation through its clear, lockable front door. The OptiVault connects via a USB 2.0 connection and sells for $3495. The optional rack mount goes for $99.95. A 50 disc set of the TuffCoat Archival DVD media costs $62.50. www.primera8.com
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