The Advantages Of Off-site Data Storage

Everyone who uses a computer for any reason needs to take backups. Even if you just play games on your computer, you will want to keep a note of your highest score and your place 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 crucial for an IT business - it is the income stream, the more important your data is, the more you should treasure your data backups. Most people 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 trustworthy. Data on these traditional media is subject to deterioration, a type of natural wastage. However, they can also be destroyed in a fire or by magnetic fields, be 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 experts have been struggling with that question for fifty years. Off-site storage is one answer. This means that you take 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 depot owned either by yourself or by a data storage firm.

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

However, that still relies on the data being backed up correctly. For data to be securely backed up, it should be backed up and then verified. If you have much data this can be a lengthy process if you only have one or two aging PC's in the office. If this is the case, people often skip verification or only back up in the correct manner 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 nonsense, 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.

Nowadays, I create all my backups by the book, but by a new method. I now use a cloud drive. This sounds fanciful, but what it means is that i send my data to a different firm 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 kind of data backup that I have ever discovered and it is cheap to free. A number of firms offer free storage up to a certain 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 writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is now 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