Unlocking the Power of LiveArchive: Exploring the Need for RDS/DB Integration

We’ve had a busy December rolling out LiveArchive with our partners and one of the most common questions that comes up is:

“Do I really need RDS/MariaDB/database service for LiveArchive? Can’t I get away with just S3 if we’re only using it for backup?”

The technical answers to this are “no” and “yes”, respectively. Unfortunately, in the real world both those answers are wrong. Allow us to explain:

ExchangeDefender LiveArchive relies on S3 object storage to store emails which is why it’s required for the service. ExchangeDefender does not require the RDS/MariaDB/database service for deployment – we will still perform the same backup of messages to object storage and place all emails into the appropriate user@domain.com folder. You can still download .eml files and open them with no issues in Outlook and other popular email clients.

Problem:

Unless you know the exact message I’d of the email you’re looking for you’ll have to download the entire user@domain.com directory and use a text search to locate it.

Solution:

Add RDS to LiveArchive so your archive looks more like this:

ExchangeDefender LiveArchive uses database services (choice of RDS, MariaDB, MySQL) to store message metadata which contains important message information such as message sender, recipient, subject, and attachments. That metadata is what our ExchangeDefender Web UI relies on to give you a friendly interface to access, search, export, and locate messages quickly in a friendly web interface. ExchangeDefender LiveArchive UI also enables you to filter your message view so you can do eDiscovery: enabling you to limit your search by sender, subject, and date.

We understand why some IT staff would want to do the bare minimum – the market, “nobody is buying stuff”, the complexity, nobody is ever going to look at it – and we hope that the explanation of how database services are used gives you the initiative to deploy RDS. It’s practically free (or totally free if you run it on your hardware) and it will greatly improve your performance, reduce time to recovery, and make it possible to quickly delegate eDiscovery or move data in a format that is open, documented, and will likely be around for decades. Not even tape can claim that!