Most local backup regimes are semi-automated but still rely on somebody to change the backup medium (tape or disk) and take it offsite. Online backup services are therefore increasingly seen as an attractive and fully automated alternative.
The big names include Carbonite, iDrive and Mozy. All tend to place the emphasis on individuals and small businesses. They offer broadly similar propositions of online backup and retrieval benefiting from encrypted data transfer. The services rely on an initial upload of a full copy of the data; thereafter the software looks for differences between the files on the backup and the files on your own machine and transfers only the changed data.
The amount of historical data kept varies between the different services. Carbonite, iDrive and Mozy all support both Windows and Apple operating systems, but differences in the software can mean that the terms of service are slightly different for the different products. There are significant differences in the pricing models.
Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) charges $54.95 per year for unlimited backup capacity. While predominantly marketed at individual workstations, its online forums suggest it works on servers too. The difficulty in using this budget account on a 500GB server seems to be that it has a fair-usage policy, which I suspect might lead to your account being terminated before you had completed uploading the initial data.
iDrive Pro (www.idrive.com) charges $49.95 a month for a 500GB account. Windows users benefit from a historical record of the last 30 versions of a file, while Apple users get 10 days’ worth.
MozyPro (http://mozy.com) is reassuringly marketed for use with servers, but costs $256.95 per month for a 500GB capacity server. Mozy also states that backup is still possible when files are open or locked, which can be a critical feature.
Explosion of data
The problem for architects with all these online services is that even small practices tend to have quite large servers. While cad and Microsoft Office documents have got a little more bloated in size over the years, it is the explosion of digital photographs, Photoshop and desktop publishing files that has fuelled huge growth in data. The emphasis on individual users and relatively small businesses is no accident. The time taken to upload the initial information set becomes a significant limitation on the practicality of the service.
One solution is to look for UK-based providers which may be able to offer negotiable fees for large data sets and the facility to collect the initial copy of the data by hard disk, to be uploaded to their servers.
When considering online backup, look carefully at the small print — online backup services all spell out limitations in liability. An online backup is potentially a great addition to your arsenal, but I would recommend that it is augmented by a thorough locally executed backup. The era of remembering to change backup media and taking it offsite is not going to end quite yet.
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Whether your you need to back up your family photos for personal use or back up your important business documents, there is no doubt that we need to consider an online backup solution. We all use the internet in our everyday personal and business lives and the technology is now available to provide affordable solutions for backing up our important digital information.
The great thing today is we no longer need to rely on tape, CD or DVD backups, we can now backup automatically to the cloud. We really don’t have any more excuses for not backing up our important information. If you’ve ever experienced a hard drive crash or accidentally deleted important documents, you know how painful it can be to lose that data.
You’ll find a number of online backup services becoming available now that backing up online is a viable solution. You can find our online backup reviews of these online services providers that we’ve tested ourselves. From the online backup solutions we’ve seen, they predominately seem to be focusing on the personal user however others providers like SugarSync are catering for small businesses with their 250gb business plan.
While backing up online is now really easy, it’s still recommended to backup your data to some other form of hard media that you store away from your computers location just in case your online service providers data is lost as well as your own computer. Whilst this is a most unlikely scenario, it’s better to take extra precautions particularly if your data is irreplaceable.
As we continue to rely more heavily on online data backup, we would expect the cost of such services to become marginally cheaper however we would expect the capacity of our data backup provider plans to grow with our dependancy on this type of technology.
The beauty of online backup solutions, is that providers rarely just provide a backup solution but rather an entire suite of functionality including file syncing, document collaboration and document version control. With all this great technology, we can’t wait to see what they offer next.
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