What To Look For In Online Backup Solution

By Author: Hakim Majali
Total Articles: 17
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Nowadays, the concept of online backup became common and many people started using it due to the many advantages it offers like automatic backup, no need to buy flash or external drives, data is accessible from anywhere, and many other features.
Online backup solutions are not all alike. In general, all online backup solutions backup the data online allowing users to restore it when needed using some mechanism. However, some solutions offer advanced features set that makes the user's job a lot easier when it gets to restoring or finding lost data. Here is a list of some main features a buyer should look for:
1. Continuous Backup vs. Manual Upload
Many solutions offer continuous backup by replicating folders/file additions, changes, and deletion to the online backup site in a continuous fashion seamlessly. In this case, a user does not have to worry about remembering to backup files; it is done behind the scene seamlessly. Some solutions allow user to control the frequency and time of data backup like setting a schedule or update period length.
Other solutions do not backup data continuously; instead ...
... they offer the user the storage space and leave it up to the user to upload his data files each time he needs. This requires the user to upload his data files/folders manually each time he wants the new copy online. This makes it inconvenient to the user as he has to do this manually each time there is a change in the data.

2. Files/Folder versioning or archiving
Some solutions offer the so called file versioning (also known as archiving) where the system keeps the old files versions that have been overwritten or deleted and timestamp them for future archive in case user needs to get them. This allows users to access an old file version that has been deleted or overwritten which can save a lot of user time in case he accidently deleted or overwrote a critical file or data.

3. Data Privacy Options
Generally Speaking, most online backup solutions perform data encryption on data while it is getting backed up (or uploaded) to the online backup store. This is called session encryption. Solutions use a variety of encryption options for backup session such as SSL, AES and Blowfish. This protects the privacy for data while being transmitted from user's PC to online backup store.
On the other hand, some solutions offer additional layer of protection to data privacy by giving the user the choice to store files encrypted using user's own selected password. This means no one can open the file but the user since he will be the only one to know the password.

4. Compression Support
Some solutions offer data compression before or after the backup process. Compressing backed up data can achieve two main good things for us: Makes backup consume less space, and performs backup quicker. Depending on user files types (documents, images, databases, etc), compression might not be helpful if user decides to backup files that are already in a sort of compressed format like (JPG images, some EXE files).

For more information please visit MDI Online Backup
Hakim Majali, Secure Data Replicator. Inc online backup and data protection services please visit My Data Image MDI Online Backup to get more information.