Saturday, September 29, 2012

Online Backup-Why You Need It

By Walter Henry


Hard drive crashes. Fires. Theft. All of these unfortunate calamities claim people's computer files and digital data every day of the year. Despite knowing that it's a huge gamble to leave your important information and data on your PC's drive without some kind of off-site storage, most people do not back up their data. And they pay the price in time, money, reputation and anguish.

Those who have caught on to the viability and the necessity of storing your important and irreplaceable data off-site (somewhere other than your residence) are increasingly realizing that the cloud is where you need to store your data.

Although the term "cloud" hasn't always been clearly understood, most people now are realizing that it is the millions of virtual servers responsible for housing the huge amount of important data that cannot afford to be lost.

In most cases, online storage systems are devoted to two major areas-backing up (and restoring) important data and transferring large or important files. The most robust plans offer humongous data limits along multiple computers for under $500/year. Other plans offer a small monthly fee and cover one or two PCs worth of data.

One valuable feature of most service is automatic syncing, which means the user doesn't need to remember to backup files every week or month; the service does the backup automatically at predetermined time intervals.

What is most appealing about cloud storage services is that they don't require buying more "stuff", no hard drives, server boxes or anything you have to keep track of. Your data is housed in the virtual sky-the cloud.

Those of us who have needed to send heavy music files or photos to friends have already had first hand experience with cloud services. these files are too big to be handled by most email services, so we have to employ one of the cloud data systems that now seem to be ubiqitous on the market.

In fact, you may find that most of your friends have subscribed to one or more of these services (subscribing is the only way to send the files) out of sheer necessity to get files from point A to point B. The next step, online backup is what's taking hold nowadays, particularly with business who cannot afford even the hint of loss of vital data.

All it takes is one horror story about losing a client's data to theft, a computer virus, or natural disaster to teach the lesson of the value of off-site online backup. In the future, cloud storage will be the norm for minimal data security and peace of mind.

Welcome to the future.




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