I’ve been trying to come up with a plan as to the best way to make sure we don’t lose any of our digital photos, video and other data that we have on our computers.
When I was a kid, you could take a photo of something, put the negatives in a safe and be relatively secure in the thought that, baring some natural disaster, you would never use your photos. Today, everything is digital. I don’t have a problem with that; but I’ve seen enough hard disks fail to realise just how devastating it can be to lose a whole bunch of data. And the bigger hard disks get, the more damage a broken hard disk can cause.
One solution is to make use of an online storage provider. iBackup, for example, is one of the leading Online Backup and Storage companies. They provide you with a “network drive” that’s a secure location in their servers where you can just drop files and rest assured that they will never be lost. Behind the scenes, the service uses a SAN/NAS setup with multiple levels of redundancy to ensure that data is never lost. The data is also transmitted a stored in a secure fashion, using industry-standard security systems and processes.
The service also scales to enterprise clients (at a higher cost of course). This could be an integral part of their business continuity plans as the service also caters for sharing data across different sites. One major advantage is that companies don’t need to worry about scaling their backup and storage facilities, the hosting company has all the storage they can need.
It’s good to know such options exist. The downside is that if you ever lose any data .. you have only yourself to blame!