Why is this a problem?
Drives only last so long—if you have questions about how long a drives last, see our recent post on drive life expectancy [hyperlink to article]. And if you only switch out drives when they’re at the end of their lives, you’re risking all of that important data (likely worth WAY more than the drive itself!) on your backups to be corrupted and inaccessible.
So what should you be doing to be safe?
The general IT golden rule is always the rule of 3—to lower your risk of a karmic event, always have 3 copies of your important data. The original, a backup of the original and an archive of the backup. Each of these backups should be kept in different locations. If you’re using drives, that means a lot of realty—especially if you’re backing up a lot of data!
You should be replacing backup drives at least every other year. That means someone not only needs to be responsible for swapping drives daily, but someone has to make sure to change out drives in the rotation often! And then keeping these backups in a safe place for that just in case instance where you need to recover that really important file.
Isn’t there anything better?
While disk backups were the standard for the last decade, our cloud technologies have become much more reliable than any disk backup process. Our cloud has built in triplicate replication and eliminates the need for someone to manually swap out disks.
And the benefits of cloud backups just keep coming:
Get you back online faster— cloud backups are continually working—and if a problem exists, you are back online within a couple hours. Rather, to restore from disk, you would need to first get access to the backup drives, then transport it to the office, then start the restore process. That means hours of additional wait time!
Backups that last longer— as we mentioned, your disk backups only last about two years. BUT cloud backups last in duplicate or triplicate forever (well as long as you pay for the space J) and you don’t have to worry about the backups failing- they are constantly being tested and maintained. That means that even if you have to restore from a backup, you have it at your fingertips with no worries or what if’s.
Backups that cost less—costs associated with disk backups are multi-fold. Think of cost of storage space, labor costs to regularly replace drives, cost of the drives themselves. With cloud, you just pay for the space you use—no more!
I’m worried about your networks, your data, your systems. I think about them day in and day out. I think about the ‘what if’s’. If something were to happen, is everything safe. The reason why I’ve moved my company’s backups completely to the fitCloud and encourage all of my clients to use our cloud solution is that we know it works better—safer—faster – and cheaper than any disk or physical backup. And on top of all of that, you are working directly with us—people that have been and continue to be dedicated to getting your business the right technology to fit your needs.
If you have any questions about the right backup solution for your business, please feel free to give us a call today!
