Smaller businesses can back up data online with ease. The challenge is in selecting from the host of consumer, local, and commercial providers to find a vendor that can be entrusted with your company's most sensitive information, trade secrets, and financial records
You had a backup system. Your VAR set you up with a tape drive, backup software, and a box of tapes when it set up your network. You followed the directions. You backed up your data. Then the busy season came. And the office manager charged with changing the tapes every morning quit; she trained the new guy to change the tape every day, but she didn't show him how to check the backup program's alerts. So, when you actually tried to restore from a tape, you discovered your last good backup was six months old. You had to face it; your traditional tape backup system was broken.
After the obligatory expletives, a few angry calls to the reseller, and a thousand dollars or so for data recovery, you bought a USB hard drive and climbed back onto the backup treadmill. Now your backup now runs successfully every night. Unfortunately, it's also still in your office, still connected to your server and still vulnerable to fire, theft, viruses, floods, and everything else but gloom of night.
Why do you face this problem? Because the backup tools you're using were designed for big enterprises with large IT staffs that make sure backups run right. The big enterprises pay couriers from companies with names like Iron Mountain and Recall to take away their backup tapes and store them. When these companies lose a tape, it makes the news, because most states require that the public, and affected people, be notified when their data goes missing. The cost of off-site data protection, not mention the couriers and in-house IT staff, adds up quickly.
Fortunately for smaller businesses, there's another option: Take advantage of your broadband connection and backup online. All you need to do is install a little agent on the computers you want to protect and the software does the rest. But how can you store your company's most sensitive information, trade secrets and financial records on someone else's server?
In reality, it's much easier to break into your office and steal your server than to steal your data from online backup providers. Their backup software encrypts your data before it leaves your computer using an encryption key that you know but they don't; your data remains encrypted while they store it and is only decrypted when you restore it. That does means you had better keep your access key and password in a safe place because cracking today's encryption is a lot harder than it looks on television, and no one at the online backup provider will have your key.
One knock on online backup services is that they take forever to restore. Though restoring all your data from an online service may take longer than from tape, restoring any given file is likely to be faster. Cable modem users should expect download speeds of 30 MB per minute. But that's just the restore time: 20 minutes to restore a 500-MB file is still likely to take less time than finding the right tape, mounting it, and restoring the file. If your server does go belly up, you can start downloading your most important files to a workstation immediately while the server is being rebuilt, long before you could restore from tape. If you do have massive amounts of data, most online backup providers will overnight you DVDs or an NAS appliance with your data.
Nine questions you should ask before choosing a provider
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