When good backups go bad, part 1: Online backups
Online backup services have become very popular over the past few years, with companies like iBackup, Carbonite, and EMC providing offerings that promise to whisk-away your data to storage hidden deep within the Internet. If something happens to your computer, not to worry – you’ll be able to restore your data without missing a beat.
And to be sure, online if effective – but like any service, it’s not flawless. Here are some things to look out for when finding a solution that works for you.
What’s your bandwidth?
Most online backup services work by copying files up to the server if they’ve changed. This is great for small Word and Excel files, but if you have a huge Outlook file, you may be facing a fairly long process – a 2 gigabyte mail file would take 14 hours to transmit over AT&T’s entry-level DSL service.
If you find your backups are still running when you start your day, you can look at some of the backup providers that will perform “block-level” backups, only sending the parts of the files that have changed. Mozy is one of these providers.
Cheap is cheap
Carbonite is one of the less expensive providers out there – only $49/year no matter how much you have to backup, but remember that getting the data up to their servers is only half the equation.
I recently had a client who needed to restore her data after reloading her laptop OS. Everything worked great until we tried to restore her 1-gigabyte Outlook file; she only received a portion of her mail. After a 3-hour hold time, Carbonite support was friendly but ultimately unsuccessful in restoring this file.
We were eventually able to restore her mail, but it took several days of restarting the restoration process before we could receive the file without the download stalling. And worst of all, their backup client had a useless status indicator: we couldn’t tell how much had downloaded or how much time we had left.
Our suggestion is to not go on price alone. See how responsive their support organization is. Hopefully you have some friends/associates who can provide recommendations. We’ve had good luck with iBackup, but are currently migrating to Mozy Pro for its block-level backup capability. Whatever you choose, make sure you test the restoration process.
Who has access to your backups?
Here’s a little secret about the low-cost backup providers: most don’t use their own servers for storage. Instead, they leverage the massive farms provided by Amazon’s S3 storage service. This means you’re dealing with at least several providers who might have access to your data.
You should evaluate whether the security provided by the online storage company is adequate for the data you’ll be backing up. Most have the ability to encrypt the data locally on your computer before it is placed in the storage farms with a passphrase of your choosing. Of course, you have to trust that this password is indeed kept locally and not captured by the service.
For our clients, we usually recommend multiple backup approaches. We’ll discuss these in an upcoming post.