Austin Lane

Today, we begin a series of articles that examine the various backup options that network support vendors recommend to clients. The first backup option that will be reviewed is the newcomer, Online Backups. The online, remote backups are the current fad in backup and disaster recovery planning. As a result, it is the first backup type that we look at.

Online Backup Benefits

Online backup systems include these and other benefits:

• Online backups do not require regular user intervention to function normally.
• Online backups store data off-site.
• Online backups encrypt data in transit.

Online Backup Disadvantages

• Online backup data recovery can be extremely slow. By its very nature, data must be recovered via the Internet, or the Online Backup provider must ship a tape or hard drive for full data recovery.
• Online backups are unable to perform full backups daily.
• Online backups are completely dependent on high-speed internet connections. If you try to backup your data when there is a broadband outage, you are out of luck. If you need to recover a file for use by 5:00 PM today, and it is 4:30PM, and the broadband connection is not working, then you are out of luck.

Online Backup Pricing Strategies

Online backup services base their pricing strategies around these items:

• total amount of backed-up data
• number of machines covered by the online backup service
• data retention and archiving periods
• online vs. shipped recovery options

As you can see, there are quite a few factors to consider when looking at Online Backup solutions. Much of the information above has come from the Online Backup article on Wikipedia.

Next Week’s article will cover Disk-Based backup solutions.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Backup, Browsers, Email, IT Services, Internet, Windows XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.