Backing up mail: what each tool actually covers
Plenty of tools deal with email, and they do quite different jobs. We have grouped them into five families, with what each one really does, where istorel is a good fit and where it is not.
Five families of tools
Part of the confusion is that “backup” means something different depending on which vendor is using the word.
| Family | What it does | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure backup Veeam, Nakivo, Proxmox Backup Server | Backs up the machines and volumes your mail server runs on, and can restore all of it | Has nothing to work with when a third party hosts your mailbox, because there is no machine of yours to back up |
| Legal archiving MailStore, Google Vault, Microsoft Purview | Keeps a searchable record of messages for compliance and litigation | Does not put a mailbox back the way it was, and is expensive if your needs are simple |
| Manual export PST, mbox, drag and drop | Takes a snapshot on a given day, with no subscription | Misses everything that arrives afterwards, and in practice nobody repeats it every month |
| Do it yourself imapsync, offlineimap, cron | Copies mailboxes for free and leaves you fully in control | You need a server, monitoring, a restore you have actually tested, and someone to take over when the person who set it up leaves |
| Managed mail backup istorel | Copies mailboxes over IMAP, keeps deleted emails, lets you find and download a single message, watches every backup and alerts you when one fails | Does not back up your machines, and is not a certified legal archiving tool |
Veeam and similar tools
These tools are very good at what they are designed for, which is bringing a whole infrastructure back after a disaster. If you run your own mail server on your own hardware, they already handle much of the job, and istorel mainly gives you an extra copy held outside your infrastructure.
If your mailboxes are at Infomaniak, Gandi, OVHcloud or Google, they cannot help with email. There is no machine or volume for them to back up. The only way in is IMAP.
Backup or archiving: two different needs
Archiving is for finding, say, every email exchanged with a supplier between March and June, and proving none of them was altered. Backup is for getting back what someone deleted from their mailbox. Both needs are real, and it is rare for one tool to handle both well.
istorel is a backup tool. It also handles everyday searches by subject, content, correspondent or folder, including in emails deleted from the server. Today you recover a message by downloading it as an .eml file. Restoring straight into the mailbox is in development.
When istorel is not the right choice
In these situations you are better off with a different tool.
- You need certified legal archiving with qualified timestamps. That is not something we provide.
- Your mailboxes cannot be reached over IMAP, for example an Exchange server with IMAP turned off. We have no way to connect.
- You want to back up virtual machines. You need an infrastructure backup tool; we run one, on a separate site.
Questions
- Does istorel replace Veeam?
- No, and Veeam does not replace istorel either. Veeam backs up machines; istorel backs up mailboxes hosted somewhere else. A company that runs its own mail server may well want both, Veeam to rebuild the server and istorel to get a deleted email back without restoring the whole server.
- Why not imapsync and a cron job?
- That works, and we know the tool well. Copying the mail is the easy part. The time goes into everything around it: a server, storage that keeps growing, alerts when a run fails, a restore you have tested, and someone to look after it once the person who wrote the script has moved on.
- What about Google Vault or Microsoft Purview?
- They are archiving and legal retention tools, tied to their own suite. They are meant for compliance and litigation rather than restoring a mailbox, and they do not cover mailboxes hosted elsewhere.
- Do you back up Microsoft 365?
- Not at the moment. Microsoft has removed password sign-in for IMAP on Exchange Online, so only OAuth 2.0 connections still work. Until istorel supports OAuth, we cannot back up a Microsoft 365 mailbox.
- How does the price compare?
- 4.99 € excl. VAT per mailbox per month for your first twenty-four mailboxes, less after that, with 100 GB of storage per mailbox pooled across the account. We do not list other vendors’ prices because they change often and any comparison would soon be out of date.
See for yourself
Connect a mailbox, delete an email, then find it in the backup. If istorel is not right for you, we refund your first invoice within 14 days.
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