Onsite Storage and Backup Hardware and Software
This section concentrates on onsite Backup and Storage solutions (Hardware and Software) – in your own building. Most individuals and companies have valuable data that is important or critical for their life or business and need to carefully choose the most appropriate software and hardware to protect that valuable digital asset. This section focuses on providing the best advice for your personal, business or organisation onsite data protection solutions.
We clarify the often incorrect use of the terms Storage and Backup – it is common to use these terms interchangeably, however they have two different functions.
We also look at Backup and Recovery software required for day to day data management as opposed to specialist data recovery programs that are just used when catastrophe strikes.
Cloud / Online backup and storage are very much buzz terms however every individual or business should also have robust inhouse backup and storage hardware and software solutions.
Clarification of Onsite vs Offsite
Onsite
– the physical backups you make within your own building: usually External Hard Disk, RAID or Tape + others mentioned in this section.
Offsite – Removing your physical onsite medium
Onsite backups are of no benefit if your building burns down in the middle of the night. As Eli The Computer Guy says in the video below, very very few business actually make the effort to take a backup copy of all data offsite overnight.
Offsite – Automated backup to the Cloud
This is the ‘belt and braces approach’, you keep good onsite backups, but have an automated system to copy this backup to an online / cloud server.
Just as important as doing backups is testing your backups – arstechnica.com did a poll of business owners and found that less than 40% test their backups once a month and even worse, 38% never test their backups.
