The Problem With Online Backup

Online Backup is a fantastic way to get your most important data backed-up and moved offsite. Anyone who is serious about data backup and recovery knows how important it is to maintain a backup copy of your data in a secure offsite location. In recent years online backup services have become a popular solution for offsite backups. This popularity is driven by the relative low cost of moving backup data offsite as compared to traditional backups with media physically transported to an offsite facility. While online backup services are the ideal solution for many data backup and recovery needs, there some notable situations where online backup services should not be used.

If your business requires you to be capable of recovering from a disaster within a very short period of time, then online backup services can only serve as a solution to a small part of your overall disaster recovery plan. You will need computers, telephones, and places for people to work. Many large corporations have disaster recovery plans that include standby operations centers that are equipped to take over the essential processing required to keep the business up and running. It is often required that data is replicated in real-time to an alternate site so that it will be available in the event of disaster.

Many small businesses and home users don't have the bandwidth to upload very large amounts of data in a reasonable time. Backing up large video files and databases to an offsite facility over a slow ADSL connection may not be feasible. While backing up several gigabytes a day over an ADSL up-link at 256Mb/s may not be practical, this is not a typical situation. Most small and medium businesses and home users don't have that much data to transfer offsite. And, a good online backup service provider will use technology that will only transfer the changed files and the parts of files that have changed. In almost all cases online backup services are a great way to secure the most important files for any size operation. It may not be practical for a small business or home computer owner to maintain their entire hard-drives offsite. Regular backups to a portable disk drive may be appropriate for larger files that don't change often, and online backup for the data that changes daily may be the most cost effective solution.

In most cases, maintaining disk images on an online backup service would not be practical. The cost would be prohibitive and the transfer times would be impossible. I personally backup my documents to an online backup service, while I maintain copies of all of my software in a different location. When my hard drive fails, which happens every few years, I buy a new, bigger and faster, HD, and then install all of my software from scratch, and then restore my data from my online backup service provider. Even though it takes me several hours to completely recover; I have a clean new installation and all of my data intact when completed. In my case, the loss of several hours of time is not worth spending hundreds of dollars a month to reduce to a couple of hours.

I have consulted many businesses on techniques and procedures for backing up data, managing and monitoring backup media, and use of online backup systems. Rhinoback is an online backup services provider that uses a secondary site to protect against a disaster at the main datacenter. An entire set of servers and storage arrays are up and running 24x7 at the disaster recovery center, which is located in separate geographic location. All data that is maintained by Rhinoback is replicated in real-time to the secondary site. In addition, all server software is setup and running at the secondary site. In the event of disaster at the main data center, the secondary site is already up and running with current data and the same capabilities as the main site. This level of disaster readiness is not required by all businesses, but when it is, careful planning beyond online backup services is required.

Everyone should evaluate their own situation, determine how much downtime you can afford, and how much disaster recovery is justified. Online backup services can usually play an important role in your backup and recovery plans, however, they are usually on part of the solution. Remember that if your data is worth backing up, then it is worth storing offsite.

Backup Data to a Portable Hard Drive

I am still astonished at the number of people who do not backup their computer data. Everyday I talk to people who have important data on their computers but they don't make much of an effort to backup or protect their data. Every once in while I talk to someone who is backing up data to a USB drive. If you are at least backing up your data to a portable hard drive occasionally, then you are better off than the vast majority of home and small business computer users.

While the USB or other portable drive is a great way to backup data, your data may be vulnerable in a number of ways:

• You usually only have a single restore point on a portable drive. The files on your portable drive usually represent the state they were in as of the last time you made a copy. If you accidentally deleted or damaged some files yesterday, and then made your backup copy last night, then you only have the files as they were at the time you made your backup copy. You may not have the ability to go back a few generations and restore files that were changed prior to your last backup.

• It is common for the portable drive to be in the same building and usually at the same desk where the computer sits. If a fire or other disaster occurs, your backup will likely be destroyed as well.

• Manual procedures to backup files often result in missed backups. Or infrequent backups. If your software automates the scheduling of backups, then you are probably leaving your portable drive attached to your computer and it is subject to the same fate as your computer in the event of a disaster.

Don't stop using your USB drive or portable disk to backup your data. Just be aware that you still have risk of losing data. Depending on the consequences of losing your data; you may want to consider other steps to protect your most valuable data or any data that would be costly to lose or recover. A good online backup solution can solve these problems. Online backup gives you the offsite protection as well as the automation and ability to recover from previous backups. There are some very good online backup service providers that charge a very reasonable price, so your data doesn't have to be extremely critical to justify the cost. In most cases, a single loss of data will be more costly than the online backup service will cost over several years.