How offsite backups can avoid data loss

Dave’s Computers in New Jersey works a lot with our local community performing data recovery and general computer and network services. One thing we like to tell everyone is the importance of backups. We all know we need them but few actually get around to doing them. One thing we suggest a lot is an offsite backup.

An offsite backup is a backup of your critical data stored elsewhere. For businesses, this could be your disaster recovery location, data storage facility or in the cloud. For home users, this is usually the cloud. With many cloud providers offering gigabytes of storage for free, it makes sense to use some of that storage for backups.

Preventing data loss with offsite backups

An effective backup solution is a copy stored locally and at least one copy offsite. That way, if something happens to your home, like fire or burglary, you have another copy of all your data safe in the cloud. You may never need it and you may never use it but it will be there if you do.

Our data recovery services are very good but they take time and are not guaranteed to recover everything. Our success rate is very high but data recovery is an inexact science and computers just love to overwrite data to save space. Once overwritten, that data is extremely difficult to salvage. Nothing is impossible though!

Data backup and security

Data backups are essential for preserving personal data, family pictures and anything you don’t want to or cannot afford to lose. With most of us putting more of our documents and data on the computer, the requirement to keep it safe becomes more important.

With malware, ransomware and viruses on the increase, it isn’t just hardware failure or accident that causes data loss. Attacks are becoming more sophisticated all the time and while new viruses are decreasing, attempted attacks by existing ones are not. New malware and ransomware is being developed constantly and malware scanners struggle to keep up.

An offsite data backup protects your from all these threats, accidents, hardware failures and attack.

Setting up offsite backups is very straightforward. If you use Windows, OneDrive is built in and can be configured to backup your files. If you use Mac, TimeMachine does the same thing. There are also lots of third party programs for both systems that can copy and back up entire drives or folders as needed.

It takes less than 15 minutes to set up an offsite backup. Considering the potential of data loss, it makes perfect sense to do it. If you need help setting it up, Dave’s Computers will help.