Guest Post: Using Online Backup Services to Protect and Manage Your Data

As you all know by now, data backups are very important to me. This morning over on Mom Blog Magazine, a post on the subject, Online Backup and Storage Options to Protect Your Data was published. I wrote the post on Monday. So, it was quite ironic when the below post was presented to me as a guest post. Although it's on the same subject, it presents a couple of different options for online storage. This post is written by Abdul Karim, a technology, gadget and data security geek with a keen interest in cloud computing and blogging, when away from his computers he enjoys weightlifting, swimming and played basketball competitively.

It wasn’t long after the introduction of thumb drives that it was realistically possible to make backups of files very quickly and transfer them with you to use on another computer or to just make backups for security reasons. It was a huge leap in technology from using floppy discs or burning lots of single write CDR discs.

Many innovative users realised the advantage of emailing files to yourself to access them from various different locations, as well as to collaborate files with different users. Since then, this concept has been improved radically and it’s now possible to use online data backup services to make backups online, collaborate with other users as well as synchronise files between different computers.

Who benefits from online backup?

Online data backup services are extremely invaluable for both individuals and corporate users, firstly individuals can synchronise files between various computers such as an android, laptop and PC without advanced networking capabilities, which is very simple to set up using free downloadable software provided by the online backup service.

Secondly for SMEs online backup is an exciting option as it allows small businesses to scale their computing expenses based on usage. For online backup, corporations would pay a monthly fee based on number of users or gigabytes used. So large corporations tend to pay more than small businesses, which is an attractive option for start-ups as it avoids huge upfront fees which are typical of IT expenditures.

What online backup services are available?

End users are spilt for choice as there are a number of online backup services available, SugarSync provides vastly superior synchronisation and collaboration tools which enables end users to quickly upload backups of their files online as soon as they are edited, and they are then archived online and download onto other computers which have permission to access the files. So it’s possible to interchangeably use a couple of different computers to work on a project and never worry about versioning issues. SugarSync offers 5GB for free, and has a paid plan for 30GB data use.

For more gigabyte hungry users LiveDrive can be useful, as they offer unlimited data capacity, although their synchronisation ability at the moment is quite limited.

For a full listings on the services on offer and their features read the online backup reviews page.

The future trend of cloud computing

Online Backup falls under the umbrella group known as cloud computing, also known as SaaS [software as a service], which is basically web based software such as google docs, online backup, email, web hosting, web based account packages etc.

It’s predicted that as internet speeds and web access improves, we’re slowly going to move towards a much more web integrated life, at the moment we may be using online backup to safeguard our files, but it’s estimated that in future we’ll be storing our files solely online, and our computing environment will also begin to move online, so instead of logging onto our PCs, we would basically using any computer to go online and then log onto our web based computing environment to use our applications and files.