The Best Off Site Storage Solution For Doctors And Small Business
The one thing that will fail is your hard drive. Either from a virus or from age or even dust that collects inside doing damage one day at a time. I know some of the most up to date use flash drives but they fail without notice also. You may be asking yourself how I know this. Simple, I have had several old and new hard drives fail as well as CF cards I use for my executive portrait photography business. I also have a platinum wedding band store on line that requires me to keep sales and warranty information secure for several years after a client makes a purchase.
Flash drives don’t have moving parts they do have connections and connections do fail. This means the information you have to keep will be on the only drive that gets damaged. No one knows why this happens but it is always the important information that gets lost.
A dual drive system is a great solution for hard drive failure but could be a problem if the system is not damaged from a virus or hard drive crash but taken during a home or office burglary.
I can already here people saying why not use an external hard drive for back up. Again this does work and will save you most of the time until the cat, dog or small child knocks the drive off your desk or the new roof leak drips just enough to ruin the drive placed on the floor where you thought it would be safe.
Another option is burning DVDs or Cd’s but that takes time and they seem to scratch at random. You would also have to have a bank lock box to keep them off premises in case of water, fire or theft. That gets costly and will fill up fast if you store a lot of data. Just like hard drive failure nothing will happen until the one day you forget to take the disk to the bank and it ends up damaged or stolen.
My solution is to use one of the above plus a second off site source. While Mozy and Carbonite back up are well advertised and do a good job, the one factor I see missing is extended storage of files removed from your system. As a photographer I need to keep photo files for years and that is just too much data to hold on my desktop and don’t trust a DVD or external drive alone. I required a service that would hold my files until I removed them. Most delete the file 30 days after you remove, or accidentally erase it from your hard drive and yes I have erased the wrong file before and not known it for months.Others may accept external drive data but require you to plug the drive in before the 30 days is out to prevent removal.
After a lot of research I found a Back Up Provider using Amazon servers that will allow me to upload 4 systems or several hard drives in my desk top plus 2 external and my laptop to a single account. The files stay as long as I am a member. I can erase them from my system and they stay in my external back up. No more 30-day time frame to worry about. They offer a 1GB free account, which may be good for student laptops and 15-day free trial for unlimited storage accounts.
The system I use is Elephant Off Site Back-up . I use it for my executive business portrait business and sleep sound at night knowing my files are secure. Check here for free reprint licence: The Best Off Site Storage Solution For Doctors And Small Business.
