Online Backup and Restore

Technology has made rapid advancement over the past 10 years. Today not only do we have computers, but we also have a host of other devices that record information digitally. We have smartphones, iPads, e-readers, digital cameras, and digital video recorders and MP3 players. All of these new devices create and save huge amounts of data on a daily basis. Many of us seem to have a digital record of just about every waking moment and all that data is important to us. If you are saving all of these files to your local computer, what would you do you if your computer has a complete meltdown tomorrow?

That thought sent a shudder through you, didn’t it? No one wants to lose all their precious files, videos, photos, and all the other data that we accumulate. Despite the fact that no one wants to lose their files, far too many people are not backing up your files on a regular basis or when they are, they are doing it incorrectly. A lot of people are still committing their backups to external hard drives and then keep in those hard drives in the same place as their computer.

What happens if have a flood or fire and your backups are stored on the premises? You might as well have not bothered to back up at all. If you plan on backing up physical storage, you absolutely must store those copies at another location. Even if you do this, however, it really is not enough. Experts recommend that you have at least three backup copies of all of your important files and at least two of those copies must be stored offsite.

Today there are a host of online data backup services that are available for inexpensive, easy, offsite storage. A copy of your files is stored either at the service’s own servers or in the cloud. Even if you do a physical copy that you store nearby, as most of us do, your other two needed copies should be through two different online backup providers. The main reason for using two different providers is protection against something happening to one of those providers.

Online data backup services are not immune to suffering from server crashes or hardware failures that could result in a loss of your valuable data. That is the main reason why we recommend that you use at least two different services for your remote backups. Another good reason is if you have multiple computers as often only one computer will be backed up per account. Even if you can back up more than one computer to your account, it is probably not a wise choice to make. It will get very confusing when the time comes that you need to restore your computer using your online backup.

Using multiple online data backup services may sound like it would take a lot of extra time but that is not the case. For one thing, only the first initial full backup will take more than a few minutes. Once there has been a complete system backup, incremental changes are the only ones that will have to be regularly stored. This means that only files that changed since the last backup will be recorded and added to your backup in storage.