On Line Archiving
Online archiving is a system whereby the archive system is physically attached to an organisations’ network at all time. It has the benefit in that it is efficient and allows for fast access of archived material and the archiving process can be automated.
Off Line Archiving
Traditionally most archiving was off line whereby an IT manager would have to archive information from a computer network and then physically move that information to a separate system for retention. The drawback with this is that is the time and labour required in order to complete this task as well as the problem that if someone needed to access some archived data, the whole procedure would have to be repeated in reverse.