How it fails: Online and cloud backup

Online backup, often named by the buzz word "cloud", is when you have a program upload your data to a company that will keep it safe. When you needs the data you can download it. This is very easy because the program pretty much takes care of itself, and you get a real offsite backup.

This sounds perfect, and when something does that you can know it is not:

• Companies goes bankrupt - online backup companies does too and even though your data exists the servers are turned off.
• Data loss - all the usual ways of losing data applies to these companies too. They may have better safety but not 100%.
• Got a new credit card? And did you forget to update the number with your online backup? And maby the contact e-mail address was outdated. You might not notice untill it is too late.
• You lose the password or encryption key for the backup, you lose it all.

By the way: All of these scenarios has happened within the relatively few online backup has existed.

Online backup or cloud backup

With todays fast and cheap internet connections it is very popular to make a backup to "the cloud". It usually works like this:

• The backup company provides a program which you install.
• You tell the program what to backup and lets your computer run until all of the data has been uploaded.
• From now on the program will only upload the data that changed, which is usually very little.

One thing to look for, is if the company has a separate restore price. When you have lost your data, it is not fun to find out that you must pay a horrible rate to get your data back. Restore should be part of the subscription.

Everything can fail

The most basic principle in making a good backup strategy is: Everything can fail.

Harddrives break down, DVDs are suddenly unreadable and the fancy "in the cloud" online backup company goes out of buisness.

Think this way: At any time there is a probabillity that a given data storage will fail you. When that happens it will take some time before you realise it, it will take some time to get a replacement storage and it will take some time to make a new backup.