On a recent Gadget Show shown on Channel 5, Jon promoted backing up of your computer.

He showed various different online backup services, “competitors” of GBData if you will, and complained that even they lose data (see here for more information on the famous Carbonite data loss), which he showed.  Why am I therefore bringing this to your attention you may ask?

Well he finished by saying that IT specialists say that computer data needs to be held in 3 different places, else it is not held at all.  Well this is not news to GBData.  Our service offers the option of also backing up your data to an inexpensive external hard drive, as well as transfering your encrypted files safely offsite to the GBData servers.  This therefore allows your data to be in 3 places at once; where it was originally stored, on a local external hard drive; encrypted of course, and off site on our servers.

When evaluating backup methods keep this in mind, because few others offer this as an option.

There is an interesting article today, that discusses the cost of backing up your data.

The article can be found here:

It discusses the time when you have to perform a restore of your data, your heart is in your mouth, and suddenly the cost of backing up springs to mind; have you been a cheapskate, or does this premium service really work?

Backing up your data is the same as taking out insurance, no one wants to spend any money on it, until the times when you really need it, then you are really glad you spent that money.

Of course everything has a value, and you would not pay any price for a backup service, because ultimately your data has a value too, it is up to you to put a real value on the loss of that data, before deciding on how much you would be happy to pay for a backup service.

Carl.

The importance of an online data storage backup solution has been emphasised by a significant loss of information in the US.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a computer glitch in Santa Clara County resulted in the loss of backup copies of information.

It has been estimated that the cost of replacing this information will be around $600,000, to get the information needed about tenant and rental units for the Housing Authority in the area.

The news provider reports that “computer hardware and software failures” led to 1.6 million images being wiped out, meaning officials will have to go over the original documents again to reload the data.

Of course, with an online data storage backup solution, there would have been no risk of accidentally wiping out data as it would be kept secure with a hosting company.

Online data backup services were recently recommended to small and medium-sized businesses looking for disaster recovery abilities without having to invest in hardware.