The Benefits Of Off-site Data Backup

by Owen Jones⁽²²¹⁾ Red Star

http://the-real-way.com

Everyone who uses a computer for any reason needs to take backups. Even if you merely play games on your computer, you will want to remember your highest score and your position in the game, but if you run a business with that computer, then backups are even more important. They are absolutely necessary.

Data is an important tool in any business and it is necessary for an IT business - it is the income stream, the more vital your data is, the more you should treasure your data backups. Most individuals store their data backups on removable disks - thirty years ago it would have been on tape or 4.25 inch floppy disks; twenty years ago, it would have been on 2.5 inch disks and ten years ago until now on CD.

However, none of these media is completely safe. Data on these traditional media is subject to deterioration, a sort of natural wastage. However, they can also get destroyed in a fire or by magnetic fields, get stolen or become lost. This is not actually a satisfactory situation for a business that relies on its data.

So what is the solution? IT specialists have been struggling with that question for fifty years. Off-site storage is one solution. This means that you make at least two backups of your data at given points during the day, place one in your office safe and send one by courier to a safe storage location owned either by yourself or by a data storage company.

This is still the system that most businesses use, if they back up their data on a regular basis at all. It is cheap and at least two times as safe as keeping your backup data on the office premises. After all, it is extremely unlikely that two buildings will burn down or get robbed on the same day.

However, that still relies on the data being backed up correctly. For data to be securely backed up, it ought to be backed up and then verified. If you have a lot of data this can be a lengthy process if you only have one or two aging PC's in the office. If this is a fact, people often skip verification or just back up properly once a week.

I have been in both these predicaments. Fifteen years ago, I did not verify our office data and had three months of unusable rubbish, when our hard drive crashed, because I had not verified it and something was wrong with the back up program and ten years ago, I had a decent backup, but it was a week old and had to pay my secretary a week's overtime to re-input that week's data.

Nowadays, I make all my backups by the book, but by a new procedure. I now use a cloud drive. This sounds fanciful, but what it means is that i send my data to another firm somewhere in the world automatically by means of the Net every day. It happens in the background automatically. You just set the program up, tell it what data to backup and off it goes.

This is the best kind of data backup that I have ever found and it is cheap to free. A number of businesses offer free storage up to a certain amount of bandwidth or data storage capacity. Just enter 'cloud data storage' into a search engine. Now all you have to worry about is what happens if the Internet goes down.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the Microsoft Antivirus Software. If you have an interest in such issues, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software Suite

Article submitted Friday, June 10, 2011 & read 40 times.

Owen Jones writes on many subjects and is currently running several websites. He was born in Wales but now lives in northern, rural Thailand.

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