The first thing you need to do is order an online backup account, this could be a free 2GB account, 50GB or 100GB account for £4.75 or £9.50 per month respectively.  Once you have ordered you will receive an automated mail detailing your username, password and where to download the software from (please keep this safe as you will need it at a later date).  Download the backup software and install it just like any other application.  Once you have done this you can logon to the backup application and select the data you wish to backup.  When you have told the backup software which files you require to be secured you can then set a backup schedule, for example, at what time do you want the software to check for any new or changed files and then automatically backup.  So that is all you have to do to protect your data.

To make your backup experience as seamless and secure as possible the backup software works very hard in the background making sure your data is protected but at the same time allowing you to carry out your daily computing tasks.

First of all, before your initial backup is carried out your computer or server calculates what data is to be backed up and will create a temporary copy this is called a volume shadow copy, this will allow files to be backed up whilst you are still working on them.  Then all data to be backed up is encrypted, this ensures that only you have access to your data, then it is compressed, which means you can send more data through your internet connection.  Once your data has been encrypted and compresses only then will it be transferred to our server and data storage infrastructures.  Your data will then be stored in the same encrypted state which means even we do not have access.

Now the clever bit really starts.  After you have completed your first backup (this could take hours or take weeks depending on how much data you have) all future backups will be incremental.  This means that only files which have changed or are new will be backed up which in turn means you do not need to run a new full backup every night.  So what happens the next time you backup is, your computer or server will communicate with our servers, they will the compare data and decide what data is new or what has changed, and then backup only the changes.  The effect of the incremental backup is if you have 500MB of data stored with us and 1% of the data changes throughout the day then you will only ever need to backup 5MB of data over night.

The crucial fact of online backup is that this whole process is totally automated, you just carry on doing what you have always done.