Years ago, asking a client for their data backup usually involved a shoebox full of labeled and relabeled 3.
5 inch floppy disks with cryptic dates and '1 of' notations.
Over the years, technology has progressed from the shoebox to a fire-proof box full of expensive magnetic tapes, and more recently, an external hard disk drive or two.
Backup methodology has changed as well in the intervening years, and is just now reaching a critical turning point.
Good backup methodology over the last decade has included the concept of safeguarding an offsite copy of the system backup at regular intervals.
Even laymen can understand the good business sense of having a backup that is in another location, safely out of the reach of whatever disaster might befall the onsite backup.
Even this precaution has been put to the test in recent years.
More often than not, the concept of an offsite backup merely extends to the backup administrator taking a copy of the backup home every evening.
Notwithstanding the security issues involved in entrusting a digital copy of the company's financial data being relegated to the administrator's nightstand, large-scale natural disasters have highlighted the hole in the methodology.
Many a hurricane-struck business in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina were dealt a wake-up call when their businesses were flooded, as well as the backup administrator's house five miles down the road.
Broadband adoption has eliminated the bandwidth frugality of the past, opening the door for the next wave of backup methodology, online backup.
Ads on television and radio sing the praises of online backup.
The main doubt that nags at most users and businesses is the safe, secure storage of their important financial data by a third-party online backup company.
Is Online Backup Safe? Not the simplest question to answer, but for the most part, yes, online backup is safe.
As with anything else, the safety and security of your online backup provider lies within the tools that they use.
Most reputable online backup companies never see your data in any useful form, as it is encrypted before it leaves your system, and only decrypted after it returns to your system.
Your data is encrypted with a key, and a reputable online backup vendor wants nothing to do with that key.
If you lose it, your data is just bits and bytes floating in the ether.
Look for the encryption touted by the online backup service.
Ciphers such as Twofish and 3DES (Triple DES) provide outstanding levels of security.
If you are unfamiliar with the terminology, do some digging on the Internet and find out how long it would take to decipher your information without the key.
These facts and figures will go a long way to increase your confidence in the safety of online backup.
What are the Benefits? Online File Restores - Not only does online backup provide the user with solid, offsite backup, it provides some incredible extra benefits.
Depending on your service, you may be able to recover a lost file, or even just the file you forgot to bring to the conference, over the Internet, to any machine with an Internet connection.
Retention Periods - Have you ever deleted a file and not found out that you lost it until a week later? What if your backup admin only has seven tapes, overwriting last Monday's tape this Monday? With retention periods, even deleted files can be saved until the user-configurable retention period has expired.
Versioning - Your two-hundred page proposal is due tomorrow.
The problem is, you accidentally deleted forty pages, but you don't know when the change was made.
Wouldn't it be great to have the last twenty versions of that file available to restore? Incremental Delta Backups - Sounds complicated, but very handy.
If you have a 1GB email folder, do you need to upload the whole file every time you get a new email? With delta backups, only the changed portions of a file will need to be backed up.
A Changing Landscape Online backup is still a relatively niche market, seeing great increases in current levels of enterprise adoption.
With complex encryption and the ability to only save changes, it is becoming a much more cost-effective player in the field of backup and is poised to become the dominant backup solution in coming years.
5 inch floppy disks with cryptic dates and '1 of' notations.
Over the years, technology has progressed from the shoebox to a fire-proof box full of expensive magnetic tapes, and more recently, an external hard disk drive or two.
Backup methodology has changed as well in the intervening years, and is just now reaching a critical turning point.
Good backup methodology over the last decade has included the concept of safeguarding an offsite copy of the system backup at regular intervals.
Even laymen can understand the good business sense of having a backup that is in another location, safely out of the reach of whatever disaster might befall the onsite backup.
Even this precaution has been put to the test in recent years.
More often than not, the concept of an offsite backup merely extends to the backup administrator taking a copy of the backup home every evening.
Notwithstanding the security issues involved in entrusting a digital copy of the company's financial data being relegated to the administrator's nightstand, large-scale natural disasters have highlighted the hole in the methodology.
Many a hurricane-struck business in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina were dealt a wake-up call when their businesses were flooded, as well as the backup administrator's house five miles down the road.
Broadband adoption has eliminated the bandwidth frugality of the past, opening the door for the next wave of backup methodology, online backup.
Ads on television and radio sing the praises of online backup.
The main doubt that nags at most users and businesses is the safe, secure storage of their important financial data by a third-party online backup company.
Is Online Backup Safe? Not the simplest question to answer, but for the most part, yes, online backup is safe.
As with anything else, the safety and security of your online backup provider lies within the tools that they use.
Most reputable online backup companies never see your data in any useful form, as it is encrypted before it leaves your system, and only decrypted after it returns to your system.
Your data is encrypted with a key, and a reputable online backup vendor wants nothing to do with that key.
If you lose it, your data is just bits and bytes floating in the ether.
Look for the encryption touted by the online backup service.
Ciphers such as Twofish and 3DES (Triple DES) provide outstanding levels of security.
If you are unfamiliar with the terminology, do some digging on the Internet and find out how long it would take to decipher your information without the key.
These facts and figures will go a long way to increase your confidence in the safety of online backup.
What are the Benefits? Online File Restores - Not only does online backup provide the user with solid, offsite backup, it provides some incredible extra benefits.
Depending on your service, you may be able to recover a lost file, or even just the file you forgot to bring to the conference, over the Internet, to any machine with an Internet connection.
Retention Periods - Have you ever deleted a file and not found out that you lost it until a week later? What if your backup admin only has seven tapes, overwriting last Monday's tape this Monday? With retention periods, even deleted files can be saved until the user-configurable retention period has expired.
Versioning - Your two-hundred page proposal is due tomorrow.
The problem is, you accidentally deleted forty pages, but you don't know when the change was made.
Wouldn't it be great to have the last twenty versions of that file available to restore? Incremental Delta Backups - Sounds complicated, but very handy.
If you have a 1GB email folder, do you need to upload the whole file every time you get a new email? With delta backups, only the changed portions of a file will need to be backed up.
A Changing Landscape Online backup is still a relatively niche market, seeing great increases in current levels of enterprise adoption.
With complex encryption and the ability to only save changes, it is becoming a much more cost-effective player in the field of backup and is poised to become the dominant backup solution in coming years.
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