5 points you should consider
Choosing the right Online Backup Company can be hard work. It’s unfamiliar to most, and yet, very necessary in today’s digital world. I’ve put together 5 points you should consider before selecting the company for your data. Obviously, I should be selling you a Safe Data Storage Online Backup account, but that’s probably not why you are reading this blog. So the aim of this blog is to help you keep your data safe and with a company that provides everything it should.
lots of hidden extras
For most companies this is usually the deciding factor, but be aware, there are lots of hidden extras. For example, if you want to backup more than 1 machine or even a NAS, you may have to buy an additional license which may be a one off cost or monthly charge.
look at what features are offered
Some large companies will offer unlimited storage for a low price, but this often comes with other restrictions. Take a look at what features are offered. Just backing up files may not be enough. If you run an Exchange server or an SQL server, do they provide agents to back them up live, going back to point 1, are there additional cost for this. A really good feature you should start looking for is the ability to backup an entire server via an Image backup. This will save you hours if not days when restoring a server
4 hours is a long time when you haveusers on your back wanting their data
When your system goes down, are you happy to wait for an email response from support? I read an article stating that smaller companies only offer email support. I disagree with this and if you look around at some of the big players in Online Backup, you will find that email support is free and often the only thing they offer and generally will respond within 24 hours. 24 hours is a long time when you have users on your back wanting their data restored!
you will be safe, right?
So if you sign up with a gigantic online backup provider you will be safe, right? Think again. Comcast the largest US based ISP stopped offering online backup to it’s clients as of 1st December 2013. I can see this happening to other large companies as they realize that you can’t give away unlimited storage accounts, and when they back track, they will upset their customers just like Comcast.
without any speed limitations
The internet can be very deceiving place. A service provider can have a great website, promise the world, but where are their servers. I have been in the online backup industry for over 10 years and in this time, I have come across companies with servers running “out the back” of an office without any replication or backup of their own. Ask the provider about the following:
What type of equipment they useWho has access to this equipment?The location of the storageDo they replicate the data?If so, where is there replication site?Do they let you backup / restore without any speed limitations (for the life of the account, not just the initial trial / upload period) Very common!
Replication of data is so important. Just because the service provider has a failure shouldn’t mean you have to upload all your data again! From a service providers point of view, this is a must – Trust me, I have just been in a situation where we had to swap one of our backup servers from live to replication. Without our replication site, customers would have had to upload over 50TB of data again. This would be very wrong! Hardware does fail even for us! I know of 2 Huge Backup providers that don’t offer replication as standard. It’s worth asking the question!