Online Backups

Rule number 1 – Always always always good to have.

Rule number 2 – Free comes with a price.

The first part of this is that everyone, every business, should have an online backup.  Call it online backup, call it cloud backup, call it whatever you will.  It’s inexpensive, automatic, and your absolute best bet at not losing any data.

Free backup systems like Dropbox and Google Drive are cool.  We like them.  And SOMETHING is better than NOTHING. But at the business level what we believe is more important is the support system for those online backups.  Granted we haven’t exhaustively tested their systems but how many resources do you think a company puts behind something they offer free?  Just something to think about. However, we have reports that the home clients who have had to use Google Drive to restore files didn’t seem to have any issues getting their data…

And what you may not know is that many local and national laws require that the data be kept within United States boundaries.  For example accounting firms.  Of course there’s the whole idea of supporting local businesses because if they have a business that pays local people, those local people have money to buy your product.

So nationally we can recommend Carbonite, but first on our local list is Crashplan.  They are based in Minneapolis and now just spreading national.  Very good system and the price is right.  Their support team is actually pretty easy to work with.

Let’s say that the price you pay for their service is under $100 yearly.  You’ll pass that in the blink of an eye trying to recover lost data.  And you can call them and talk to a real person if you have any problems.

So online backup is worth 8 of 10 points.  Local and accessible online backup is worth 10.

Stop waiting to get your data backed up!  We get too many calls from folks who meant to get their data backed up… and now their hard drive has crashed, or they dropped their laptop, or the flash drive they kept the data on was crushed in a horrible accident… etc., etc.  Don’t let that be you!  And if you need help knowing what to have backed up, feel free to give us a call.

Happy (backed-up) computing!