Online Backup Guide - Why You Should Consider Using an Online Backup Solution

If you value your business then consider an offsite backup solution. I am glad I did.

This isn't the most exciting first article someone could write but to be honest I thought I would just pick a recent experience that some people may find interesting, I own my own business which is an e-commerce company selling luxury pet products. we are a small family business that work hard for each other, spending everyday competing for customers by means of Google and other online advertising and trying to get our orders out on time before the dreaded courier arrives for his daily collections.

Recently we have expanded as business is going quite well (which is a bit of a surprise in this current climate) As we are an online company, technology plays a massive part in our day to day working life thanks to our server and growing collection of workstations that get used for various purposes during the day. we have recently upgraded all of our IT equipment to keep up with the times and as you can imagine, we have a huge amount of data stored on our servers such as customer data, company data, images websites , and we rely on a conventional backup tape drive to store all of this data.

Being conscious of how important this data is, I always buy new backup tapes every 12 months so my existing ones do not get corrupted. For users of backup drives out there, make sure you change your tapes every 12 months overwise they can become unstable. A member of staff is responsible for taking the previous nights backup tape home in case of the worst happening and this has been the routine now for many years, to be honest she forgets to take the backup tape home now and again but at the end of the day we are all human and due to this I always make sure I leave a tape at home every week should we need a backup in an emergency.

Last month was one of those days where we needed to restore an item from the backup, as usually I asked Lisa for last night's backup tape which she duly gave to me from her handbag, I inserted the tape and started the processor restoring the file needed for our company. I tried to restore the file needed for our work but to my horror nothing was appearing on the backup schedule. I rebooted the machine again and tried to run the backup but yet again, nothing appeared on the tape.

Now I was starting to panic, so I called my wife and asked her to bring in the old tape that I left at home as a backup. "what tape?" she said. There is nothing under the bed where you usually keep it?

My heart dropped, we needed this particular document for accounts purposes and if we didn't get it we were in trouble. in a last ditch attempt, I decided to call our IT Company to see if there was anything that could be done.

I note that day as one of the luckiest in my life. The IT company had been experimenting with a new backup service where you data gets backed up online, about three weeks ago I agreed for them to use my company as a test for using the system and completely forgot about it. "its no problem sir, we can have your file restored in 2 minutes, you got lucky". Damn right I did, I just had my company saved by a trial installation of online backup that I completely forgot about!

I guess I ended up writing this article to make people aware of how important your data is and if you don't back it up correctly then you could lose data that could cost you your business altogether, I came very close to it and I can tell you, it leaves a pit in your stomach. we now use online backup all the time and we wouldn't be without it now.