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It seems like a lot of you who were evacuated during the fires grabbed your computers and ran out the door.
In a tragedy like this, is seems that some of our valuable treasures are on our hard drives.
An internal hard drive is inside your computer. It’s a box with a spinning disc inside and a needle,
like a very fast record player, that is able to access the information on the disc. With that in mind, you should
know that hard drives can crash. In general, they last 3 – 5 years. This brings up the question, should we entrust
our valuable data to hard drives? The answer is a resolute No! While…, at least not to only one hard drive.
During the fires, it seems like a lot of people grabbed their external hard drive. (An external hard drive is a hard
drive that is connected outside of your computer and is generally used to back up the data on your internal hard drive.)
Good thinking. Now you have your data in 2 places and it’s easier to carry an external hard drive then it is to carry your
entire computer.
Is online storage secure?
Another way of saving your valuable data is to back it up to a secure storage site on the internet. I talk to many people
who resist this because they’re worried that online storage isn’t very secure. They say, how could it be secure if it’s
on the internet? The internet doesn’t seem like a very secure place, and they would be correct. However, your home
computer is more susceptible to viruses than online storage. Also your home computer is susceptible to hard drive
crashes. Secure online storage centers, like ibackup.com have datacenters with redundant servers with multiple hard drives
that back up to each other. Not only do the servers copy data instantly across many hard drives, the data is also
backed up across at least 2 datacenters and sometimes more across the country. Also your home computer is more
susceptible to attacks from the internet. Even if you have antivirus and hardware and software firewalls on your home network, your
security is less than the firewall technology and antivirus security that a datacenter would have.
But your data is traveling across the internet before it gets to the secure storage, Is it secure
while it's traveling to the datacenter? Secure storage centers will access your
data using 128-bit or higher encryption. They’ll also require at least 2 layers of authentication with secure passwords. Strong
authentication and encryption make it very difficult hack while it's traveling to the datacenter. It would be easier for
a hacker to access your data on a home computer, which in many cases doesn't even have a password.
Which online storage should I use?
The good news is that you probably already have some of your data in online storage.
Yahoo,
hotmail and most internet e-mail is a form of secure online storage. If you use Snapfish
, Shutterfly, Flickr,
Kodak Gallery,
Windows Live or many of the other online photo sharing sites, then you’ve got a backup of your photos online.
You may also have a website that comes with online storage, so check with them first before buying another service.
For secure online storage, we recommend ibackup.com. ibackup has a variety of plans starting at $9.95 a month for
up to 5GBs. Like most online backup services, ibackup has software that can be installed on your computer and
configured to automatically back up your data nightly at a certain time. Ibackup will then send you a daily
email that tells you if there were any errors in the backup. You can also upload your data to ibackups website
through their web interface. You may also want to check out these services: xdrive,
Swiss disk, Edocs,
Datadepositbox, Storage Guardian
and Underground Backups.
Some things to consider:
We have noticed in our experience with internet backups that there is one point of failure, and that’s your PC and the user.
Internet backup software should be run on a clean PC that doesn’t hibernate or go into standby during the scheduled backup
time and it has be monitored regularly just like any other kind of backup.
So try online storage. Next time you're evacuated you won’t have to worry about unplugging all those cables and lugging your computer out to the car!
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- Steve Fink MCSE, MCSA, A+, Network+, Witzend Computing -
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