Remote Backups, Offsite Storage
Why Remote Backup is a good idea for small businesses
In a perfect world, local backups would leave you fully protected. In reality, disaster happens. They say that there are those who have suffered data loss at some point, and there are those who will. When disaster strikes, how protected will you be? What if your staff does not take that tape off location and your business is robbed? What if they forget to change tapes and yesterday's backup is actually today's? Have you been replacing those old tapes or cartridges on a regular basis with new ones? If a natural disaster destroyed your office, how would you function at another location?
Having a good network company or IT department actively and competently maintaining your backups is obviously the first line of defense. Insuring that backup by protecting your mission critical files with an automated nightly offsite backup is a wise and prudent strategy. If you have a broadband connection, you can install a Remote Backup Client on your fileserver that backs up your mission critical files to a remote server every night.
It is important to recognize that there are many kinds of remote backups, even when discussing only internet backups. There are a number of reputable service companies out there that will help you backup your data over the internet. The amounts of data, fees and capabilities are truly staggering.
Buying a 15GB backup plan doesn't make it feasible or even useful. Most small businesses that we work with use Business DSL accounts for the office, frame relay or combined voice/data lines. Our testing reveals that the usable upload from these accounts (on the average) is only about 190 - 240k. Yes, modern bit-level incremental backups greatly reduce the amount of traffic needed, but among our clients even this traffic can be a burden depending on the amount you are archiving.
Although Remote Backup Services are an excellent "insurance policy" for your mission critical files, we wouldn't want this to be anyone's only backup plan for the 10 - 30 GB of data most small to medium sized offices depend on for their daily needs.
We promote Remote Backups not as an alternative to good, reliable local backups... but as an insurance policy for your mission critical files.
As easy as One, Two...
Protecting your critical data is a two step process: Make sure you have good local backups, and make sure you have a copy offsite. It's not just common sense, most people don't do this, even though it will be a Federal Requirement for some industries.
|
Step One:
A Good Local Backup Program
If your business is here in South Florida, give Advantage Services a call. Their friendly, knowledgable technicians have guided hundreds of area businesses through the rocky waters of disaster recovery.
- Keep your files in a central location on the network
- Backup up those files nightly. There are many ways to do this. The majority of clients that Advantage Services maintains chose Veritas Backup Exec and 4mm DAT or DLT removable media.
- Store periodic backups off location to protect yourself from robbery, arson or natural disaster
|
|
Step Two:
Protect Mission Critical Files with a Remote Backup
Using the efficient and easy to use NovaNET-Web Remote Backup client, you can backup up your mission critical files to one of WDDX.NET, Inc.'s Internet Backup servers. Your critical data is encypted with your own private key (448 bit Blowfish Encryption) before it is transmitted and stored, ensuring a safe, private backup. With the easy to use interface you can schedule nightly backups, restore single files or entire backup sets with just a few clicks of a mouse.
|
| 
