Which Backup Solutions Are Right for You?

By:Andrew Stratton

One of your company's most important assets is its electronic data. Your company stores it's financial, documentation, and correspondence documentation on its servers.

What would happen to your company if you had a fire or flood and you lost all of your valuable data? How expensive would a recovery effort be? Would your business be able to recover from such a loss, and where would you even begin the recovery process?

These are all questions which should be answered with well planned backup solutions.

Every business today should have a disaster recovery plan in place for its electronic data. No matter how large or small your company is, you need to be able to restore your electronic data if something happens to your servers or to your physical building location.

To build your disaster recovery plan, you have some choices to make about how you secure your files and where you will store it.

Onsite Backup

Your data can be backed on onto media tapes at your present location. If you have a small amount of information you can perform complete this task each evening when no one is in the building.

If you choose to copy your server each night, you will need multiple tapes so that you will always have past archives to restore from if the need arises.

At least once each week, you want to take your restore media to an offsite location to store. By storing a copy of your data offsite, you ensure that if there is a disaster to your physical building, your information will still be available to you.

If you have a large amount of information you can choose an incremental method. This backs up only that which is new or has been changed since the last backup date. Again, at least once each week you will want to perform a complete replication and store the tapes offsite.

The down side to onsite backup is that it requires you to have an administrator to physically swap-out tapes and remember to move your data offsite. And, media tapes can be very expensive and you will need many of them for your nightly and weekly backups.

Offsite Backup Using an Online Backup Service

A more attractive option in backup solutions is to perform all of this with an offsite backup location by utilizing an online backup service. To do this you would simply schedule a time for your server to connect to your online backup service and replicate onto their server. The information will travel over the Internet and will be encrypted for security.

There are many big advantages to using an online backup service. You do not have to purchase media. You do not have to have someone remember to physically change your tapes and remember to bring them to an offsite location. And, your information is much easier to restore if you ever need to restore it for any reason.

It is very important for all businesses to address the issue of backing up and storing their electronic data. You need to plan for things to go wrong, because at some point things usually do happen. And, you can come out the hero if you can restore the data your company loses!

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Article keywords: backup solutions, Offsite data storage, online data storage, online data backup, backup data, data recove

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Your business can never be too prepared when disaster strikes. Secure your data with online backup solutions from Global Data Vault. Avoid downtime and revenue loss with offsite backup services from Global Data Vault. http://www.globaldatavault.com

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