The Benefits Of Off-site Data Backup Everyone who utilizes a computer for any reason needs to take backups. Even if you only play games on your computer, you will want to keep a note of your highest score and your place in the game, but if you run a business with that computer, then backups are even more important. They are absolutely necessary. Data is a vital tool in any business and it is necessary for an IT business - it is the earnings stream, the more vital your data is, the more you ought to treasure your data backups. Most individuals keep their data backups on removable disks - thirty years ago it would have been on tape or 4.25 inch floppy disks; twenty years ago, it would have been on 2.5 inch disks and ten years ago until now on CD. However, none of these media is completely trustworthy. Data on these traditional media is subject to deterioration, a sort of natural wastage. However, they can also get destroyed in a fire or by magnetic fields, get stolen or get lost. This is not really an acceptable situation for a business that relies on its data. So what is the answer? IT experts have been struggling with that question for fifty years. Off-site storage is one answer. This means that you make at least two backups of your data at given points during the day, put one in your office safe and send one by courier to a safe storage location owned either by yourself or by a data storage company. This is still the method that most businesses use, if they back up their data on a ordinary basis at all. It is inexpensive and at least twice as safe as keeping your backup data on the office premises. After all, it is extremely unlikely that two buildings will burn down or get broken into on the same day. However, that still relies on the data being backed up correctly. For data to be securely backed up, it ought to be backed up and then verified. If you have much data this can be a lengthy process if you just have one or two aging PC's in the office. If this is a fact, individuals often skip verification or just back up in the right manner once a week. I have been in both these predicaments. Fifteen years ago, I did not verify our office data and had three months of unusable nonsense, when our hard drive crashed, because I had not verified it and something was wrong with the back up program and ten years ago, I had a decent backup, but it was a week old and had to pay my secretary a week's overtime to re-input that week's data. Nowadays, I make all my backups by the book, but by a new procedure. I now use a cloud drive. This sounds fanciful, but what it means is that i send my data to another company somewhere in the world automatically by means of the Internet each day. It happens in the background automatically. You simply set the program up, tell it what data to backup and off it goes. This is the best form of data backup that I have ever found and it is cheap to free. Several firms offer free storage up to a certain amount of bandwidth or data storage
capacity. Just type 'cloud data storage' into a search engine. Now all you have to worry about is what happens if the Internet goes down. Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is now involved with the Microsoft Antivirus Software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software Suite