Remote Data Backup Service

Remote data backup service appears to be one of the new hot button issues with IT people around the country as they struggle with the issues of security, terrorism, disaster scenarios and other what if situations, none of the them good for onsite data recovery prospects. There are perhaps as many questions about remote data backup software as there are about services for the same thing. The remote services are not inexpensive, with the bigger companies charging as much as twenty-five hundred dollars a month for high end services and about six hundred to a thousand dollars per month for standard services. Some remote data backup software assumes the customer has a reliable server somewhere in a remote and secure area where the software can send selected data or all data on an ongoing basis while other software providers send daily information to their servers. Think about all the reasons to employ a back up service.

A most telling statistic is that on average, one in ten computers experience hard drive crashes each year, resulting in the dreaded "fatal error" message. Some computer geniuses are able to retrieve much of the information from such a disaster, but it might be the ten percent of irretrievable information that brings about grief. There are virus attacks that can creep like slithering snakes into programs and files, corrupting them and rendering them useless, or even worse, vulnerable to a hacker's whim. Theft of a sale person's laptop in an airport terminal or perhaps stealing information sent over a wireless network can bring about untold damage to a businesses' reputation and the inability to reproduce the information on that stolen laptop or snatched from a wireless router may bring financial ruin to any business. And of course, the natural disaster, where a tornado or flood or hurricane or fire can completely destroy the computer physically, rendering even a retrieval genius impotent to bring back important information.

So why not use a remote data backup service or at least remote data backup software? Here are a few advantages to this service. First, no person in the office ever has to fiddle with backing up information every night again and no saving to CDs and no bulky tapes systems, so if a company is now having to take tapes each night to an offsite storage facility, that errand can go away. Secondly, a remote data backup service usually provides several off-site storage facilities in case one of them is destroyed and a small to midsized company may only have one distant off site. Third, the back up only occurs incrementally after the initial backup and many of these companies also offer as many as two weeks of nightly backups and the files are encrypted and compressed before leaving the company. "Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein." (Luke 18:17)

There are also some disadvantages to this kind of service. Imagine if you have had a number of years of information not backed up and you decide to dump it all to a remote data backup service. How wide is the bandwidth that runs between your company and the remote server? Can privacy be 100% guaranteed, even after the data is encrypted? What if the remote service goes out of business or the password is lost? How will lost information be recovered; Internet, disk or tape? Frankly, this writer is getting headache thinking about all of this.

With most every business today riding on the presumption that there is really no way to operate without a computer network, LAN, WAN or both, it is surprising that remote data backup service is not more widely used. Secure Internet data backup services take the responsibility of keeping clients' information very safe. Just as some scientists who are eager to save the seeds from the earth's most important food crops from disease and blight have stored thousands of backup seeds in a secret far northern arctic cave, many Internet back up services have very secure physical locations, usually underground and away from possible flood damage and often in undisclosed locations. In addition, remote data backup software varies in how each one actually saves a company's or individuals files. Some companies save the information in a differential manner. This means that the information is saved just as it is written or composed on the monitor screen. Other services save the information incrementally. This means that the information is saved as changes are made to the documents or files.

There used to be an old television ad touting car oil filters and its slogan was something like, pay now for a new filter or pay later when the engine seizes up. Perhaps the people that thought up that commercial came up with the idea of remote data backup software. Perhaps the reader has never considered that God wants every person on earth to have a backup plan also. God wants human beings to be kind to one another and be fair to each other and provide for each others' needs, but it will not be enough to enter leaven, because as one wise person said, God does not grade us on a curve. Good outweighing the bad? Not with God. His backup plan for all of us is have full and complete trust that Jesus Christ alone paid for our shortcomings, our sin and our mistakes, and that our hope for eternal life solely rests in Him.

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