Online Backup Storage Providers
Many people ignore them until it is too late – all their data is lost forever. I am talking about backups. Backups are essential to any business and should be essential to consumers as well. The steady increase of more and more digital data is immense, That new digital camera of yours takes great pictures and even videos. You upload them to your laptop or computer and then you forget about them. The next thing you know that clicking sound coming from your hard drive can’t be good. It gets even worse if you are a business with no backups. That historical accounting data that is eventually needed for the upcoming IRS audit – ouch. Nothing to defend yourself anymore. You get the idea of what I am trying to say here. Backup your data before it is too late.
I am a backup fanatic and rather have too many copies than being one short. I have been working in IT for many years as a professional system administrator. Backups have saved my jobs several times. In some cases I was even the hero that was able to bring data back that was thought of being lost forever. I am applying my professional experience at home as well. Between all my workstations and laptops the data is shared and sitting on a server. From that server I run nightly backups to an external hard drive. Every quarter I rotate that external hard with an identical twin and put it into a safety deposit box at my local bank. At the same time I bring its “twin” home to serve me as my backup drive for the next 3 months. If my house would burn down the maximum I would lose is 3 months of data. Still bad, but by far not as bad as a total loss of everything.
For my online ventures I have to use a different approach. One a dedicated server I run the hard drives in a RAID1 configuration (redundant hard drives mirrored). If one drive goes down the other one is still running. I am also backing up to a stand-alone 3rd hard drive on the dedicated server. From there I backup my data to SAN attached storage inside the same data center. If the server gets “toasted” my data is safe and I lose a maximum of 24 hours. However, what would happen if the data center burns down? I am covered by using an additional online storage service. All my backup data replicates out offsite to an online storage backup provider in a different geographic region.
All this may sound pretty expensive, but it isn’t really. If you look at providers like Liquidweb or ThePlanet – they offer very affordable dedicated servers + backup solutions (e.g. SAN, or backup services). Depending on how much data you really have to backup you are looking at $10 - $40 per month – maybe a little more. If you are looking for offsite storage providers I highly recommend Mozy or Boxnet. Well established providers in this industry that make it very easy for you to backup business and personal data at any time. The pricing is very low so that you can sign up without breaking the bank.
Visit our review of the different Mozy products - click here.
How much is your data worth? Start backing up now.
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