Remote Server Backup - How Reliable and Secure is It?

Just how reliable is a remote server backup solution, really?

It is being touted as the latest innovation in disaster recovery, high availability, and business continuity for the small-to-medium sized business owner: The ability to have the files on your desktop computer or even your servers being backed up, in real-time, over the Internet, on autopilot.

Of course, using a remote server backup solution yields substantial cost savings: You don't have to invest in any hardware or even any backup media, you don't have to license any software, and you don't have to hire technical specialists to maintain your backups for you.

Your disaster recovery solution is as simple as this:

1. Sign up with an online backup service provider.

2. Install the client agent software on your machine. This agent is always running in the
background on the machine, 24 hours a day (or whenever your PC is on.)
3. Any time you make any changes to your hard drive - files are added, modifed, or deleted,
the agent detects the change, encrypts the file, and copies the changed file across the
Internet to a remote server backup facility maintained by the service provider.
4. If you need to recover a file, all you need to do is open up Windows Explorer or "My
Computer". There, you will find a "network drive" that has set up for you. This network
drive behaves just like another hard drive, except that when you click to open it up, the files
that you see there are actually a backup version of your hard drive!
5. To recover any file, you simply copy the file from the network drive back to your local
computer's hard drive.

So just how reliable is this solution?

If you have a high-speed Internet connection, then you should have no problems. If your PC is able to download files off the Internet (and chances are 100% that your PC is able to do that!), it should be able to send files across the Internet for backup purposes, too!

And how secure is this solution?

All of the files are encrypted by the agent software before being uploaded to the remote server backup facility. What that means is that nobody, not even the folks who work at the online service provider, would be able to read or manipulate your data. It is completely secure.

Are you prepared in case disaster strikes and you lose your data? Fortunately, there is an easy solution: You can backup your data online instantly on autopilot.

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