What You Need to Know About Remote Data Backup

You've heard the techie mantra a thousand times - "backup, backup, backup."

It's as valid as it ever was. Hard drives fail-it's what they do. They crash, burn, overheat, freeze, and are subject to pretty much any physical issue you can think of. Any piece of data on your hard drive is in constant danger of being lost.

Hard drives wait, too. They'll wait until all of your most crucial data is only in one place, and only then do they decide to go ballistic. They're a worthy adversary, indeed. The only way to beat them is to follow the mantra-backup your data.

But backup is a pain, right? Sure, in a lot of cases, but not necessarily.

Many businesses and private individuals are turning to remote data backup, programs that send data to a remotely located server hosted by a backup company. That way, if your house or business burns to the ground (or anything else happens to it), at least your data will still be safe, located on a remote server, waiting for you to punch in a password and download it again.

There's a lot of distrust for remote data backup; after all, you trust your files to a stranger. However, much of this distrust is misplaced.

A big concern, especially among businesses, is data privacy. Remote data backup companies will commonly encrypt data, though, so a hacker intercepting your files won't have any chance of opening them. The larger remote data backup companies are monitored constantly, as well, making theft of data pretty much impossible.

Many personal users also think that they won't have the technical knowledge necessary to use a remote data backup service, but often the services use simple programs that simply choose a directory or two and go to work. You can even set up the programs to work on a schedule, so that when you're sleeping every night, your computer's sending all of your info through the net to the remote server.