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Backupreview.net is dedicated to providing honest reviews of online data backup providers. Data backup is normally thought of as just another bill to pay. However, it is one of the most important things a company can invest in. Just as you insure your physical assets, you should make sure you have a good insurance policy on your digital assets.

Data Backup Media

There are three main types of media and technology to assist you in data backup. The oldest and most used is data backup to tape. For a while, backup to tape was the way to go for small businesses. Many companies invested in tape libraries and tape drives to assist them in their data backup process. In one sense, it automated their backups so they didn't have to manually perform the backup each day. Data backup to tape has now started to become obsolete. Not only is it unreliable (up to 50% of tapes fail when restoring), tape has become more of a nuisance to business owners that are swapping out tapes every day and taking them home.

Data backup to external hard drive has recently taken off a bit as a nice replacement to data backup to tape. External hard drives are constantly coming down in price and are much more reliable than tape. With the option to automate the daily data backup to an external hard drive, many business owners have converted their process to use these devices. The problem remains that you still have to worry about getting the backup data offsite. While its easy to justify the low cost of an external hard drive, you can't just say that if a fire or flood came through that you would just grab the external hard drive and run. Unfortunately you can't control when disaster will strike

Online Data Backup

Using an online data backup provider is probably your safest bet. It may cost you a little bit more on a monthly basis, but will undoubtedly pay for itself over time. A completely automated data backup system is well worth the money especially when you consider the time and money it saves you over the long run.

Data backup is not normally a high priority for a small business until the first time they lose data. It usually just takes on loss of data to realize the importance of a secure data backup system. There are many reasons to go with an online data backup provider. In all honesty, data backup to tape will probably be an obsolete technology in the next five years.

Reasons to switch to an online data backup provider include: Security, Reliability, Automation, Data is backed up offsite, Quicker restore times. Many business owners are concerned about the security of their data when allowing a third party to do their data backup. Most of the online data backup providers are using encryption that is unbreakable, and many of the data backup providers are compliant with regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act

The main benefits of online data backup are:

Automation: Most people claim that it is not that hard to just swap out a tape or an external hard drive, but if I were a betting man I would bet that everyone has forgotten to swap out the tape/external at some point in their career. Online data backup will completely automate the backup process in order to ensure that the backups get done on a daily basis.

Reliability: Statistics show that tape fails up to 50% of the time. Even if you are doing exactly as you are supposed to do, swapping the tapes out, taking them offsite, etc. there is a 50% chance that you might not be able to retrieve the data on the tape. Not very good odds. Online data backup is much more reliable than any other type of data backup out there. Most online data backup providers use RAID 5 and backup your data to several data centers.

Security: If you are 40 yrs or older you would probably argue that the internet is not secure and may have a hard time giving your data to the world wide web. However, because the Internet was not a very secure place for some time, many things have been developed to ensure the security of your data as it's being transferred online. Most online data backup providers will use some type of encryption when backing up your data. This turns your data into a bunch of 1's and 0's so that if someone were to be able to see your data, it wouldn't make any sense to them. Furthermore, the facilities that the online data backup providers use are much more secure and safe than your closet at home where most people are storing their tapes or external hard drives.

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