Backing up mail: what each tool actually covers
Many tools touch email, and almost none of them do the same thing. Here are the five families, what each one really settles, and the case where istorel is the right answer, along with the ones where it is not.
Five families, five jobs
The confusion comes from one word: « backup » means five different things depending on the tool saying it.
| Family | What it does | What it does not |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure backup Veeam, Nakivo, Proxmox Backup Server | Backs up the machines and volumes running the mail server, with full restore | Does not apply to a mailbox hosted by a third party: there is no machine to back up |
| Legal archiving MailStore, Google Vault, Microsoft Purview | Keeps a searchable journal of messages, for compliance and litigation | Does not restore a mailbox to its earlier state, and costs a lot for a simple need |
| Manual export PST, mbox, drag and drop | Takes a copy at a point in time, with no subscription | Protects nothing that happens afterwards, and nobody redoes it every month |
| Do it yourself imapsync, offlineimap, cron | Copies faithfully, for free, with total control | Needs a server, monitoring, a tested restore, and someone to look after it the day the author leaves |
| Managed mail backup istorel | Copies mailboxes over IMAP, keeps what was deleted, gives back a single message, monitors and warns | Does not back up your machines, and is not a certified legal archiving tool |
The Veeam case, and its peers
These tools are excellent at what they are built for: bringing back a whole infrastructure after a disaster. If you run your own mail server on your own machines, they already cover part of the ground, and istorel adds little beyond a copy held outside your infrastructure.
They cover nothing at all if your mailboxes sit at Infomaniak, Gandi, OVHcloud or Google. There is then no machine to back up and no volume to freeze: only an IMAP access exists, and that is the way in.
Backup or archiving: two needs
Archiving answers « find me every exchange with this supplier between March and June ». Backup answers « put this person’s mailbox back the way it was before they emptied it ». Both are legitimate, and a tool claiming to do both usually does one of them badly.
istorel does the second, and enough of the first for everyday search: subject, body, correspondent, folder, including in messages deleted from the server.
When istorel is not the right answer
We would rather say it here than in the third meeting.
- If you need certified legal archiving with qualified timestamping, that is not our trade.
- If your mailboxes do not speak IMAP, an Exchange setup with IMAP disabled for instance, we can do nothing.
- If you are looking to back up virtual machines, go to an infrastructure tool; we operate one, on another site.
Questions
- Does istorel replace Veeam?
- No, and the other way round no either. Veeam backs up machines, istorel backs up mailboxes hosted elsewhere. A company running its own mail server may legitimately want both: one to bring the server back, the other to return a deleted message without restoring a whole server.
- Why not imapsync and a cron job?
- It is an honest answer, and we know the tool. What it asks for is not the copying, it is everything else: a server, storage that grows, monitoring that warns, a tested restore, and someone to look after it the day its author is no longer around.
- What about Google Vault or Microsoft Purview?
- They are archiving and retention tools tied to their suite. They answer compliance and litigation, not restoring a mailbox, and they do not cover mailboxes hosted elsewhere.
- How does the price compare?
- 4.99 € per mailbox per month for the first twenty-four, less after that, storage included at 100 GB per mailbox pooled across the account. We do not publish other vendors’ prices: they change, and an undated price comparison is a false one.
The only test that matters
Connect one mailbox, delete a message, get it back. Fourteen days is plenty.
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