It seems nowadays that Online Remote Backup services are rising in popularity with each passing year. An important reason for this is that remote backup and recovery plans can be very expensive to implement in-house. In addition to the cost of hardware, software and the cost of hiring trained employees to handle the process, there is the additional expense of maintaining an off-site location for your remote backups. This last step is essential for protecting your critical data from theft, sabotage and also natural disasters.

For a nominal monthly fee, businesses are now entrusting their remote backup services to other third-party companies which ensure that all their critical data are safely transferred and stored in offsite locations for easy recovery whenever they need it. The remote backup services are also much more cost effective and reliable than traditional backup methods using tape, zip, Jazz, CDRW, or DVD drives. Once the service has been set up, it typically requires no human intervention and requires no additional hardware. If a company ever suffers from a data loss, the ROI would be hundreds of times of what was originally paid for the remote backup service.

Most remote backup services transfer data over the web and store the files in an offsite data center. These data centers provide online access to your backed up data which allows you to restore files from anywhere in the world. If due to a natural disaster or some other calamity you are unable to commute, all your data is easily available to you easily with a few clicks of your mouse.

A remote backup is usually run automatically once a day at a preset time, transferring your new and changed files securely over the Internet, in an encrypted format so as to protect against hackers. This saves you time because you don’t have to spend hours uploading files to a hard drive or downloading documents onto a CD. You don’t even have to remember that a backup is scheduled with automated remote backups.

The remote backup services are an established solution for safe storage of important computer files. Many things can happen to a computer and the data stored within them which makes it necessary that businesses and private computer users rely on the protection provided by remote backup services. Remote backup can be implemented to keep all the important files protected and are found to be far more secure and reliable than the conventional tape backup storage solutions. Individuals, small businesses, corporations, and organizations can make use of this service to ensure that their files are protected and can be easily accessed anytime.

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Most of us who use computers would have experienced a data loss of some form or the other and would be able to appreciate the importance of a data backup. Just a power outage or surge when we are working on a computer can cause some data loss, and depending on the nature of the work we are doing, can be a matter of some irritation or something more substantial like loss of a day’s hard work and thereby also its revenue.

Whether one is an individual or a business, one of the most valuable assets is the data that we’ve collected over time — accounting files, contacts and correspondence, contracts, photos, or anything else of value to us or our business. The material value of a computer is probably just a fraction of the value of the data contained within it. This becomes even more magnified when the computer contains data related to one’s work or business.

As we all know, things that are beyond our control can happen resulting in our losing our computer or the data stored in it. Hard drive crashes, data corruption, natural disasters, sabotage and human error are all serious threats that can easily destroy years of hard work and the very foundation of any business. Consider the following statistics which are just alarming:

• One in four computers will suffer a serious data loss in a given year (Gartner Group);
• Data loss costs U.S. businesses $12 billion (IDC) a year;
• 70% of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year (DTI/PriceWaterhouse Coopers).

Hence, it is very important that individuals and businesses should have an online data backup plan to protect their critical data against the myriad of risks like hard drive crashes, corruption, natural disasters, sabotage and human error. The fact is every computer and user is susceptible to these risks and a remote data backup is just essential. In case of any calamity, recovering your data is as easy as a few clicks of your mouse.

Though there are traditional methods of data backups, such as backing up data to tapes, zip and external drives, CDs and DVDs, these methods are very tedious, time consuming and unreliable. Studies have shown that over 50% of all tape restores fail! And, to protect against disasters like fire, flood and theft, backup files must be stored at an offsite location but this step is overlooked most times.

The need for a good data backup plan cannot be overemphasized and should be a solution that is an automated, online transfer of files. All the files should be transferred only in an encrypted format so that they are protected from hackers. The backups should be incremental, that is, only the new files and the files that have changed since the last backup should be transferred. Any good remote backup service, in addition to the above mentioned features, would also provide free 24/7 support.

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