Everybody Should Backup Their Computer Data.

 

Using an online backup solution to backup your data, will guarantee your data is stored offsite in a safe and secure data centre so regardless of disaster your data will always be available for restore.

 

Regardless of who you are, a home computer user, small business owner or you are responsible for data used by a large corporation, one thing is for sure; the most valuable assets of any computing infrastructure the data.  This data could be accounts or financial, client records, supplier records Word, Excel documents or even music and saved game data, regardless of what you do with your computers and servers this data is always important to you.

 

In the modern world there are a variety of reasons why data can be lost, virus, fire, flood, theft, user mistake and the list goes on, but have you ever considered what the consequences would be if you lost your data?

 

If data was lost then at best for the home user you will have wasted a lot of time and effort, possibly money.  For a small business the damage could mean complete loss of client and supplier data which would make is impossible to continue trading, for large corporate companies it will mean the possibility of days of down time costing many thousands per hour, and not to mention a loss of company reputation.

 

So assuming you have lost your data and did not have a backup, where would you go from there.  How much money are you prepared to invest in getting some of your data back, or would it be a situation where you take the loss on the chin and walk away from the whole thing turning the light out on the way out.  Either way not a great situation to be in.

 

If as a home computer user you could not live without data built up over a number of years or as a business you know your business would not be able to recover from data loss then it is time to put a backup plan into action.  You have to start addressing issues of the most suitable way to backup, where and what to backup to and more importantly how would can you easily and quickly recover your data should it be lost.

 

Now you have decided to backup your data you must investigate the most cost and resource effective method suitable to you or your business.  Usually the higher to price you pay, the greater backup and restore speed is achieved and you enjoy more automation.  But to a home user or small business this size investment is rarely possible.  Lets have a look at the options:-

 

One way to safe guard your data is to copy your data to a CD, DVD or tape media.  Due to physical storage capacities CD and DVD can only really be used buy home users and due to the high cost tape backup solutions can only be justified by business, but all of these methods will allow you to backup and store data away from your computer or server every night.

 

If you backup your data to a media of your every night, you will need at least seven CD's ,DVD's or tapes, one for each day of the week and a quite a lot of spare time to carry out the task.  Once you have backed up you will then need to move the media in question to a secure offsite location, as far away from your computer or server as possible.  The reason for this is if you keep your media within or close to your hardware then they will become open to damage from the same fire or flood from which your trying to protect your data from.

 

Another issue with backing up locally is you need to manually copy the data, remember to change the media of choice every night, verify the backup worked and then remove offsite.  This is very time consuming and as your data grows will end up taking more time than carrying out your daily tasks.

 

An automated and secure method of backup which will store data offsite is required by home users and small businesses.  This service is now widely available and it is called online backup.  This service will automatically store your data offsite by sending it via your existing internet connection.  As mentioned it is totally automatic and totally secure and you can backup anything stored on your computer or server.  The only thing you will ever need to remember is to leave your device turned on.  Imagine, doing your work in the day knowing that you data will be automatically backed up every night.  Even if you delete data by mistake you can still recover it.