There are no tears like “my back-up failed” kind of tears
There is nothing more expensive than having
to recreate your vital data!
And that’s if it can be recreated.
Often it can’t.
The real fear is how would you know if you
were vulnerable? That is the Million Dollar
Question isn’t it?
There are a million ways
to back-up your computer but none of them
mean anything unless:
- It happens every day no matter what;
- There is 100% certainty that the back-up was effective and you really can recover
your data;
- That you will know if there is a problem with your back-up system before it is too late;
I used to think that I was safe if I did one or more of the following:
- Bought the Terabyte drive at Costco and did my own back-up
- Used a remote third party to do my back-up over my broadband connection
- Had a tape on my local PC
- Had a RAID (redundant array of inexpensive drives) system on my PC
- Burn a CD and keep it at my mother’s house
- FTP the data up to your office server every night via my DSL or cable line.
There was a magic missing piece; the watchful eye of another human being.
And not just any human being but one that
understands all of the ins and outs of
backing up and encrypting data.
I was never certain that
my backups worked. Yes, I can look at backup
logs, but that’s only useful if I actually
do it, and if I know how to read them! And I
always worried about restoring the data –
would I know how to do it? Would it actually
work?
To be completely safe we think you need the following in your back-up:
- It needs to be remote (House Fire, Earthquake, Tornado, Hurricane, Flood, Etc.) so that no matter what physically happens to your computer, you are OK.
- That remote site itself needs to be backed-up itself in a distant geography so that you truly have a fail safe; you are double-protected.
- You need to have your back-up happen every day no matter what and know it if that doesn’t actually happen
- You need to know that your back-up took! This just means that if you need that back-up for whatever reason, that you have 110% certainty that you can actually recover your data.
- Now the BIG one: you need a person who is watching the whole process whose only job is to make sure all of the above happens for you every day no matter what and that if it doesn’t that they either fix it for your or they call you and work with you to get it fixed without delay.
- All of the above must happen in a way that you can afford every month of every year for the rest of your business life.
Here is the funny thing. When I first put this list together of the things I had to have in a back-up provider and went shopping I couldn’t find anyone at first who could do it.
There are lots of guys that offer cheap
backup services. After studying them
carefully, I found that they run tons of
automated services without anyone physically
there. That means that if I needed help, no
one would be there. I’d be on my own, with
my valuable data hanging in the balance.
Finally I found a service that hits all of the items on my list above. I expected it to be expensive. It wasn’t.
I had a low trust level at first. I had just been burned by one of the big “safe” national players. I have been in the computer business for 30 years. I started to drill this company’s president. Here is what I asked him:
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When you back-up my data to your remote site, how can I be sure nobody will get into my Quicken records? |
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He told me and proved to me that all my data was encrypted when it left my PC and was encrypted when it landed on his back-up system. It would only return to usable data when it landed back on my PC using my password |
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Who picks out that password? |
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You do. Nobody else will ever be able to decode your data and nobody else will ever need to know your password. |
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How secure is the encryption? |
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Your bank uses 128 bit encryption for your checking and credit card account. We use 448 bit encryption; it has never been hacked or broken into in any circumstance it has been used. This is the industry standard. |
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Could you make it safer by encrypting it more |
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Sure, but it would slow things down and run up the cost to a point that you wouldn’t want to pay for it. |
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Where is your data center |
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New Jersey. |
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Where is the back-up of your data center? |
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Toronto, Canada |
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How secure is your data center |
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You have to go through three levels of security to even get to the computers and disk drives. Each of those computers are themselves backed-up 100% of the time via a mirror image at another location – the location in Toronto, Canada. |
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How hard is it to get to my data if I have my password with me? |
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You can get your data any where, any time, from any place in the world. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. |
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Why wouldn’t I just use Google? |
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Because you have to remember to do it every day. Besides that, Google can lock you out of your data for no reason at all. If you check it out on the web there are some stories about that happening. I don’t think it’s likely but you have to remember the fine print says that they have control and you don’t. Besides that, it only happens if you remember to do it every day and you have to remember to check that it was done right. |
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So what do you cover in your back-up? |
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Everything you might need to have recovered including some things that you probably won’t know to back-up if you do it yourself such as your Outlook pst files and your email, and other obscure files that you really can’t live without but probably don’t even know exist. |
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So basically, I never have to worry about back-up again right? |
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Right. If there is even a possibility of a problem, our people call you and we get it fixed instantly. Just think of us as back-up butlers. We are here to serve and serve well. |
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So what if I want to go on a vacation for a week; what happens? |
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Your system get’s backed-up at the office no matter what. No matter what email comes in, no matter what your employees do; you are backed-up without worry! |
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What if there is a problem and you can’t reach me? |
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We keep calling until we connect with you or your designated contact. We’ll call you on all your numbers and send you email until we reach you or your designated contact. Once we reach you or your designated contact, we’ll fix the problem. |
OK, all that sounds very, very good. Now for the million dollar question, just how much does all of this amazing service cost; I’m not even sure I can afford this.
The cost for the cheap guys is as little as $4.95 per month. The only problem is you will never be sure that it worked. If you do something wrong on your end there is nobody on the other end to make sure it happened the way it was supposed to. You will have saved a little and potentially lost all your data in the process. That is not a good deal.
Also, if you need to restore the
backup, who’ll be there to help you? The
cheap guys are cheap because they run
automated processes – they have no staff!
The alternative is $14.95 a month to be certain that your back-up is always working no matter what. A very small price to pay to avoid the horror and heart ache of a crashed hard drive with no way to recover.
Ask anyone who has lived through losing
their data this question: “Is it worth
$10.00 more per month to know that no matter
what, your data is safe?” They’ll tell you
that after that experience, they’re probably
spending much more than that to ensure it
never happens again.
If that certainty is not important to you then you should absolutely go with the $4.95 a month version. On the other hand, if you are one of the millions who have been had a crash only to face the true horror of realizing that your “back-up” was an illusion, then the $14.95 a month is a very small price to pay.
Many of the small businesses in the US use this system because they know that their employees will forget and more importantly they know if they lose their data they might just be out of business.
So what do you want to do? If certainty is your thing then this may be the program for you. Here’s how to sign-up today and sleep better tonight.
