A Great Off Site Storage Solution

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.

We all know flash drives don’t have traditional moving parts so they are less likely to fail but they can and do quit working. Of course the one drive that fails will have all your most valuable date that must be saved. No one knows why these things 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.

The best solution I have found is to use one of the above plus a second off site source. While many have heard of Mozy and Carbonite on line back up you can search the Internet and find several less advertised companies. The one factor I have been comparing is length of the back up. As a photographer I need to keep photo files for years and that is just too much information to keep on my desktop and don’t trust a DVD or external drive alone. I wanted a service that would hold my files until I removed them. Most do a great job at back up but delete the file 30 days after you remove, or accidentally erase it from your hard drive. Others may accept external drive data but require you to plug the drive in before the 30 days is out to prevent removal.

After research I found a provider using Amazon servers that will allow me to upload 4 computers or several hard drives in my main system plus 2 external and my laptop to a single account for less than $10.00 per month. The files stay as long as I am a member. I can erase all the files from my system and they stay in my on line 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.I use the home version which is lower cost and have great options for the average user.

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.