One of the most important assets of a business is its data and losing it can cost them a lot. There are different means of backup solutions that a home office can rely on for saving its data besides the primary storage. That backup can be a hard drive, USB, a dedicated server, or offsite backup. In this article, you will be introduced to offsite backup solutions and different best options available to opt for in order to have your data protected with ease. Let’s get going then!
Introduction
Offsite backup means backing up your data off the site where it can’t be harmed or lost by any means. It is recommended for every home office that deals with any kind of data, to havean offsite backup solution by their side in order to be protected from any unwilling situation. An offsite backup software allows you to back up your data to a remote storage location such as a network-attached hard drive, server or even a cloud service, either commercial or private such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Amazon S3.
Capabilities/benefits of offsite backup software
• Remote Access
By backing up your data offsite, you grant yourself or any trusted person access to the data copies that are only limited by your will and network capabilities. You are the one controlling the information security and access without letting any third-party interfere. The best benefit of remote access is that you can restore or copy your data from anywhere in the world without any kind of restriction.
• Physical Data Distribution
Offsite backup software doesn’t save the copy of your dataset physically in one location but it manages several other servers to store your data. The benefit of this is that you can easily restore a copy of your data even if some physical damage or technical problem strikes on the original dataset site. Choosing the Right Color Another great benefit of offsite backup is that it removes the need for maintaining data every now and then; it can be a very useful feature for a home office as you would not want to get any extra burden on yourself. The maintenance is the duty of the service provider, not the user who keeps backups offsite.
Offsite Backup vs. Local Hard Disk Backup
In short, the major reason for backing up offsite is safety. You can get a cheap hard drive to backup all your data much faster but what if there is a fire? Or a break in and all your hardware is stolen? Not to mention the virus attacks, riots, and earthquakes that can destroy all the data stored in physical storage devices. In computing, offsite protection means to send your data to offsite locations, out of the main location. It can be sent electronically or using removable storage devices. Your data problems will be solved when you will be having the copies of your data in different locations.
Things to Consider When Searching For an Offsite Backup Solution
• Cost
When it comes to offsite backup, you should think beyond dollars. Consider the expense or harm in mind that you can face in case your data is damaged or breached. Then weigh the overall damage with the cost of the backup plan to get everything straight. Different offsite backup providers offer various packages according to their technology and services. For instance, some service providers who are pure infrastructure providers (laaS) that offer BaaS (backup as a service) will not cover any management of the backups and charge for VM license, storage, and data transfers (won’t normally happen with providers in laaS space). You will have a choice for choosing a service provider according to your home office’s requirements and it is better to choose the one that matches perfectly with your needs.
• Storage
Make sure you check the service provider’s storage plans as different providers back up data in different ways. Some prefer cloud-based backup and others might go for physical backup. The choice is totally yours to choose the one that fits your needs. You can also opt for one that offers multiple backup sources as it would really be helpful if one backup fails.
• Data Backup Schedule
It is important to consider this point while searching for an offsite backup solution as people have different schedules and types of data that they deal with at their home offices. Some may generate data every hour at their home office, so it is understandable that they will need a provider that provides hourly backups. If your data isn’t frequently updated, then you can go for daily backup or even weekly backup.
• Reason for Backup
You might want to have a backup to work on the safe side in case anything goes wrong, or you can also do it to make the data available in different locations. The reasons can vary according to the work you do at your home office. Here are some questions that you can ask yourself to decide in a much better way:
- What are your data risks?
- What should be the backup infrastructure of your data?
- How long do you want to store the backed up data?
- Why do you need to protect it?
- Is data sovereignty a big concern for you?
Here are the best offsite backup solutions to choose from according to your requirements:
1. Backblaze
Backblaze is one of the simplest solutions for offsite backup. There are no file size limits with it, which means no matter how big your hard drive is you can easily backup its files without a problem. Back up your 100 GB virtual machine files or long 4K videos, the choice is totally yours! You can get an unlimited amount of storage space for just $5/month per computer. The cost gets down to $3.96 if you subscribe to a two-year plan. If you have a home office that is dedicated to video editing work or any work that requires storing large files then Backblaze is surely for you.
Click here to sign up!
2. Carbonite
Carbonite offers three tiers that you can choose from according to your budget and requirements. • Tier 1: Safe Basic ($6/month or $71.99/year) Offers unlimited cloud backup • Tier 2: Safe Plus($9.34 /month or $111.99/year) Offers unlimited cloud backup, external hard drive backup, and automatic video backup. • Tier 3: Safe Prime($12.50 /month or $149.99 /year) This plan offers unlimited cloud backup, external hard drive backup, automatic video backup, and courier recovery service. Each tier is cheaper if you pay for two or three years upfront. Carbonite is one of few backup service providers that also have a blackberry mobile application along with Android and iOS. They also charge a bit extra for the services like external hard drive and mirror image support.
Click here to sign up with them!
3. Zetta
With Zetta, you are completely backed up! It doesn’t just backs up your important data but can also recover your lost data from and to anywhere. It is a cloud-based company that has datasets upto 500 TB. If a disaster strikes or any kind of damage occurs, Zetta will back up all your home office’s data in a secure cloud within 5 minutes.
Click here for a free Trial or to request a quote, click here.
4. Data Deposit Box
Data Deposit Box provides automatic cloud backup for small businesses. For most home offices, their data is their business. Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) do not have a complex data protection algorithm that makes the data vulnerable to hack and other damages. Keeping that in mind, Data Deposit Box is specially designed for SMBs. They provide unlimited server, mac, and PC backup. If you have a small home office set up at home with a PC full of important data then you can utilize Data Deposit Box’s services.
Click here for a free trial!
5. KeepVault
KeepVault offers two types of protection, one for home and the other for business. 1 out of 10 hard drives fails each year that can cause a lot of major problems especially for companies that rely on data for their business. KeepVault is like insurance software that provides protection to your files and backs them up the moment they change. It utilizes both, local backup drive and backup serves for protecting the data. If you want to restore the data, you can easily access it from any computer. It can back up an unlimited number of devices with end-to-end 256bit encryption.
Click here for a free trial or to see pricing and choose any package click here.
6. iDrive
iDrive is another top-rated platform to backup all your data online from an unlimited number of machines to either a 2TB or 5TB limit, which is more than enough for a home office. The upload speed is also blazing fast with iDrive, you will have an excellent file-syncing option and it also allows you to back up a full drive quickly rather than spending days uploading data. iDrive also maintains all your old files forever, that might be handy for you but you will then have to mind the storage caps too.
Click here to sign up with them!
7. Acronis True Image
Acronis True Image is one of the best online storage software with the disk-imaging program and cloud-component system tacked on. It has a potential to backup up to 5 computers and has a storage cap of 5TB for all of them. It backs up your mobile devices, social media and provides ransomware protection. The latest 2019 of Acronis even includes a survival kit that is able to quickly create a bootable file-restoration tool in case anything goes wrong. The only things that might not attract are its price, pricing structure, and inability to backup external or networked drives. If your home office has up to 5 computers and you want to back them up along with your mobile devices and social media accounts then this software would help you out.
Click here to try it now for free or if you want to subscribe to any plan, click here.
Conclusion
If you run a home office that also involves important data then you should not be careless when it comes to data protection and backup. You must have some source of backup system in case anything goes wrong. The mentioned offsite backup solutions are the best and reliable, and if you invest some time, you will get to know it too. You should opt for the one according to your home office’s requirements that also perfectly aligns with your planned budget.