The Benefits Of Off-site Data Storage
Friday, June 17th, 2011Everybody who uses a computer for any reason needs to take backups. Even if you only play games on your computer, you will like to keep a note of 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 totally crucial.
Data is a vital instrument in any business and it is necessary for an IT business – it is the earnings stream, the more important your data is, the more you should treasure your data backups. Most people keep 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 reliable. Data on these traditional media is prone to deterioration, a sort of natural wastage. However, they can also get destroyed in a fire or by magnetic fields, be stolen or become lost. This is not really a satisfactory situation for a business that depends on its data.
So what is the solution? IT experts have been wondering about 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, put 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 companies use, if they back up their data on a ordinary basis at all. It is inexpensive and at least two times as safe as storing 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 depends on the data being backed up correctly. For data to get securely backed up, it should become backed up and then verified. If you have a lot of data this can become a lengthy process if you only have one or two aging PC’s in the office. If this is a fact, people frequently skip verification or only back up properly once a week.
I have been in both these situation. Fifteen years ago, I did not verify our company 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 good backup, but it was a week old and had to pay my secretary a week’s overtime to re-input that week’s data.
These days, I make all my backups by the book, but by a new course of action. I now use a cloud drive. This sounds fanciful, but what it means is that i send my data to a different company somewhere in the world automatically by means of the Net every day. It happens in the background automatically. You merely set the program up, tell it what data to backup and off it goes.
This is the best form of data backup that I have ever discovered and it is cheap to free. A number of firms offer free storage up to a limited amount of bandwidth or data storage capacity. Merely type ‘cloud data storage’ into a search engine. Now all you have to worry about is what happens if the Net goes down.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently concerned with the Microsoft Antivirus Software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software Suite