Why should I back up?

A daft question you may think, but, it still shocks us every time we ask someone “Where do you backup your stuff to?” and their reply is “…Err ummm, well…. I haven’t got one”

All too often this occurs on the wrong side of a hard drive disaster or some other major calamity with their systems.

We have still yet to understand why people and businesses display a remarkable faith in hard drives.. they fail, that’s a fact, like anything with moving parts or electronic components, eventually they break, even with the latest RAID arrays and controllers it doesn’t provide any kind of protection against fire, theft or natural disaster.

However, it isn’t just hardware failure or damage that can cause data loss, consider virus infection, application crashes and power failures, all of these can corrupt precious data leaving a requirement for data restoration.

Data backup is essential today, it is highly unlikely a business would survive without it.

Many businesses find themselves regulated by various bodies, many of those bodies insist that their subscribers and members demonstrate their back up and disaster recovery scenarios.

So, given that we all know we need to back up our data, what kind of backup should we choose?

There are several backup methods:

  • Backup to Digital Tape device
  • Backup to Removable Hard Drive
  • Backup to CD/DVD media
  • Backup to online vault
  • Backup to remote office or disaster recovery location

Each method has its own set of advantages and pit falls, we will focus on the online backup solution and why this may be the best method.

Online backup removes the need to constantly change destination media, such as tapes, cd’s and removable drives. The online backup allows you to run a scheduled service on your machine which will automatically backup your data and send it to a secure location over the internet.

Online backup allows a restore of data to anywhere (as long as there is an internet connection available) There is no need to install any devices or drivers to restore data to a new machine, simply log in to the web interface and begin restoring your data.

Online Backup reports are delivered to any number of recipients after every single backup routine has been run. The reports detail the successful backup and, importantly, highlight any errors and issues that need to be addressed.

With online backup Data is encrypted to the highest standards before being transmitted over the internet. In today’s day and age data security is everything, data simply must be encrypted before being transmitted. Even if the data is intercepted, it is not possible to gain access to the data without the encryption key.

Online backup requires no capital outlay, there are no expensive drives to purchase, no tapes or other media. The service only requires an application to be installed on the machine and configured to carry out all of the scheduled backups.

Data retention is easy and straight forwards with online backup. There are no complicated tape or drive rotation plans required, simply set the retention period you require for deleted files and previous versions of files and off you go, the rest it automatic.

Online backup will work with low bandwidth internet connections. It maybe that you have a very large amount of data to be backed up and a slow internet connection. This scenario can be handled with a ‘seeding process’ which means that an initial backup seed is delivered to the backup servers on a removable drive and in future only changes are sent.

Sys3 offer online backup services:

Our Backup Product provides quick, efficient backups to two separate offsite vaults allowing immediate restores.

  • Supports Windows, Linux, Mac, NetWare, Solaris
  • Supports Exchange Server, Brick-level exchange mailbox, SQL Server, Oracle, Lotus Notes and MySQL backup
  • Protects all desktops and notebooks easily
  • Sends data off-site to two purpose designed data-centres
  • Backs up across low bandwidth connections
  • Allows immediate restores at the click of a mouse
  • Encrypts data at source
  • Automatic – no need for manual involvement
  • No capital outlay
  • Easy-to-use

Please feel free to pick up the phone: 0845 313 1919 and speak with Ian or Luke or, alternatively Visit Our Contact Page and enquiry from there.