Why Backup? Computers are becoming more and more important in people’s lives. They are the center of many crucial activities that people perform. Communications, finances, entertainment, news and more can be centered on your PC.
PCs are electronic and mechanical devices and they can fail. People can accidentally wipe out their own data and programs and malware can wreak havoc. The only real protection is extra copies provided by proper backup.
Backup Strategy
A backup system should provide for the ability to totally restore your system from a full wipe out. It should also make the process as painless, efficient and economical as possible. Data safety should be insured by protecting against harm and by providing high reliability data for restore. The backup system should be automated, unobtrusive and automated so that it always gets done.
Bare metal restore is best provided by a high speed backup to a an external drive using a program that is powerful and easy to use such as Acronis.
Safety is provided by having multiple copies of your data in different places. By having the data in different places, you insure that is something happens in one place the other place is not affected.
Your computer hard drive, a local external hard drive, a full backup on an external drive kept offsite and online backup provide a superior 4 levels of protection and is an ideal set up. Multiple sources insure that if 1 of the devices goes bad, you have others to cover.
There should be a daily incremental backup to a local drive, a periodic backup of the full system to an external drive which will be taken elsewhere and online backup for important data and file.
Primary Role of Online Backup
Online backup is really not meant for full system backup or even very large file backup. It’s simply too slow to do this job. A 1 GB backup will take about an hour on a fast connection. Online storage is also expensive even though it may be cost effective for some business purposes.
Online backup provided by a good company is safe and redundant in itself. The online backup companies store the data on Raid 6 type systems where the data is stored on multiple hard drives at the same time so that a few of them would have to fail at the same time to cause any loss of data (a very highly unlikely event). Additionally, they would have mirrored servers at another site so that even if 1 site went down the other would still be up.
It is also good for those who travel and can’t always get to a backup drive since all you need to backup is an Internet connection.
This means that the files that are really important and are not system files should be backed up using online backups.
Online backup also has a new feature in that it can backup contacts for iPhones and Blackberry phones.
Online Backup Features
The best online programs will have the following features:
easy backup and restore
background or scheduled backup
multiple revisions of the same file is a bonus
encryption for safety
works automatically and is reliable
Compare offerings
There are many online programs. Some of the most famous are Carbonite, Mozy, iDrive and SOS.
Compare reviews to find which one is best for you. Also search for negative reports. The reviews don’t always tell the whole story.
Summary
Online backup is an important part the overall backup that you do to keep your computer safe and humming along.
Share and Enjoy
• Facebook • Twitter • Delicious • LinkedIn • StumbleUpon • Add to favorites • Email • RSS
The post Online Backups – The Secret of Getting the Most From Them appeared first on Xfuze.