Barracuda Archiving

Frequently Asked Questions

How is Barracuda archiving licensed?

The Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service is licensed on a simple and predictable per-user basis, with no charge for inactive mailboxes. The Barracuda Message Archiver is licensed on the basis of a flat cost per appliance regardless of the number of users.

For both solutions, all functionality is included in the standard license, with no additional charges or setup fees.

How much data can I archive?

If you use the Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service, there is no limit to the amount of data that you can archive and retain indefinitely. We do recommend that you implement data retention policies to ensure compliance and reduce risk.

The Barracuda Message Archiver is available in a range of models that provide storage capabilities from 500GB up to 66TB. Multiple appliances may be clustered to provide additional capacity if needed.

How easy is it to get started with Barracuda archiving?

Setting up Barracuda archiving is extremely quick and easy for you to do yourself, following our step‑by‑step implementation guides. Most users are up and running within an hour, and there are no additional charges for setup, implementation, or importing existing data.

What are the differences between Barracuda archiving solutions?

The Barracuda Message Archiver and Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service provide similar functionality, but they differ in the way in which they are deployed.

The Barracuda Message Archiver is an all‑in‑one integrated solution. It can be deployed locally as a physical appliance, as a virtual appliance running on Hyper-V or VMware, or in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services.

The Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service is delivered as a fully‑managed service running in the Barracuda Cloud, and is available on demand. Message stubbing and reporting are not currently available in the Cloud Archiving Service.

Why can’t I just use my backup as an archive?

There are significant limitations and deficiencies with this approach which make it inadvisable. These include:

• Backups capture data at specific points in time, so cannot ensure a 100-percent complete and accurate record of all data.
• Retention policies within backups do not provide the granular level of control over data retention needed to meet more complex compliance requirements.
• Backups do not provide full‑text and multi‑level search, tagging, and export capabilities, which are may be critical for compliance with e-discovery requests.
• The point‑in‑time revisions stored by backup solutions contain multiple versions of data items, which must be reconciled to produce a single set of accurate and verifiable results for e-discovery.
• Backup solutions typically do not provide direct access for end users to search and retrieve historical data, or allow them to restore individual items without involving IT.

For these reasons we recommend the use of a dedicated archiving solution to ensure effective data protection and preservation.

Why can’t I just use PST files?

The AutoArchive function in Outlook allows users to bypass the mailbox quota limits, and was turned on by default in Outlook 2003 and 2007. It generates PST files to store email locally for each user. However, the use of PST files is no longer recommended:

• They are a security risk, as they can easily be disconnected from Outlook and copied or moved to another Outlook client. They can be password-protected, but in practice this provides ineffective protection.
• They are notoriously unreliable, as they are not designed to hold large amounts of email data, and 10 to 15 percent of an IT department’s daily helpdesk calls can be taken up with looking after these files. Due to their size, they are also susceptible to internal corruption if they are located on a network share or accessed over a network, and Microsoft specifically advises against this.
• They are typically stored on end-user laptops or desktops, and not backed up on a regular basis, therefore there is a high risk that they be lost or misplaced.
• Data stored in PST files should be managed in accordance with your regulatory compliance and data retention policies. However, due to their dispersed location and the difficulty of tracking numbers and locations, they are often excluded from this process, creating a significant ongoing risk to the organization.
• Data stored in PST files may be relevant to ongoing e-discovery or data disclosure exercises, but it can be problematic to identify, retrieve, and search this data because the location of all files may not be known, or they may not be easily accessible to IT administrators or auditors.

There is more information on PST files in our White Paper “A Guide to PST Files”