If you run a company, whether a small franchise or a budding home-based business, you know that your data is a critical element to how your business will survive, thrive or die. Loosing all of your business related data is one certain way to have your business suffer a serious blow from which you may not recover. If you can’t restore everything that you have lost you may never be able to duplicate the data. Often your clients can be of no assistance if you ask them for help, and you may come across as very unprofessional for not backing up your data in the first place.
I back up my data each night after I’m finished for the day. Additionally, I back up my data once a week in two different ways. First, I back up on an external hard drive, and second I back up to CD’s for more permanent archiving. Then each month I back up all my data on a duplicate set of CD’s and mail them to another location. If anything happened to my home-office, say a flood or worse God forbid, I’d have those CD’s at my offsite location allowing me to resort everything. I also employ file-and-folder backup software. This is all great, however, what if you need to recover all the data from the minute you lost it? Loosing even a few hours of data can result in serious problems. So, where is the best place to keep your data?
Here's a solution you might investigate. Continuous online data protection. These services have popped up as of late, and they all use some form or another of encryption so you know that your data is safe. Many offer huge amounts of data storage for one flat fee per month. A few even offer incentives to get you to try their service.
Practicing back-up of your data on a regular basis should be a no-brainer. If you require a bit more protection from loss, here are some online data service providers that I would use should disaster strike.
1. www.carbonite.com Carbonite charges about $55 dollars a year for their Carbonite Pro service. They offer a free trial for their basic service. They have no limit to their backup storage capacity. Carbonite will back up all the supported files on your internal hard drive whether you have 1GB, 10GB or more.
2. http://mozy.com I’d use MozyPro instead of MozyHome because it offers a better feature set for a business owner. With MozyPro, there are no extra hardware to buy nor any setup fees. Also, with their automatic backups, no additional management is required to oversee it all. You’ll need one desktop license for each computer you are backing up, as well as, one server license for each server that you’re backing up. Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month / Server Licenses: $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month.
3. www.storageguardian.com Storage Guardian offers a risk free one-month trial and their technology is chocked-full with sophisticated features. For example, their "send once" technology recognizes where data is duplicated across a network – no easy feat – and sends only one copy to the server, minimizing your costs and increasing efficiency. Also, their ‘Message Level Restore’ feature enables you to restore email data - down to a single email message for a specific user.
4. www.sosonlinebackup.com SOS Online Back Up offers a wide variety of features and you can even access your data via your phone. Unlike some other online backup systems, they do not delete the file from your backup just because you delete the file from your computer. With SOS you can be rest assured that they keep every version of every file indefinitely until you request to have it removed. This is a nice feature and one to look into when buying this service for your business.
Do your homework and buy a remote online back up service that best fits your needs. One day you just might thank your lucky stars that you did.
Carpe Diem My Friends!
