Offsite Vs. Onsite Data Backup

Hardware failure, viruses, unintentional or intentional deletion of data, theft, power disruption or natural disasters are all ways in which your valuable data can be lost. In today’s digital society, computers, and the information stored on them, are an indispensable tool for business and personal use. Therefore it is important that a strategy for backing up critical data is implemented. A range of onsite and offsite data storage solutions are available.

Onsite data storage refers to any typeof storage device that is designed to remain on a computer or at thesame location as the data is created or accessed. Onsite storagedevices can be a computer’s hard disk drive, tapes, CD/DVD’s, USBmemory drives, external hard drives and NAS drives.

A network attached storage (or NASdrive) is a specialised data storage system consisting of a hardwaredevice with specialised software attached to a network. The price ofa NAS drive has significantly reduced in recent years making flexiblenetwork-based storage a possibility for small business and homecomputer markets. Some leading NAS drive manufacturers are Synology,Netgear, Thecus and Iomega.

Offsite data storage is data stored at a remote location transferred either using one of the removable storage media mentioned above or electronically, using an online backup service.

Online backup is a web-based service that allows customers to back up files to a secure site. Online backup systems are typically constructed around a client software program that collects, compresses, encrypts and transfers the data to a server on a schedule, usually once a day.

Onsite backup can be costly both in time and effort and the manual processes involved also create greater potential for error. The more sophisticated forms of onsite data backup, such as an NAS drive, provide adequate disk space and fast data recovery however, offsite data storage has an advantage over onsite storage as data stored at a separate geographical location from where the data is created or accessed protects against cases such as natural disaster or theft where locally stored backups could be destroyed along with the original data.

The data storage devices used for onsite data backup are generally not encrypted and therefore sensitive information can potentially fall into the wrong hands however, online backup services encrypt all data to ensure that data is secure during transit and can only be decrypted with a key controlled by the owner of the data.

Another advantage of online backup is the convenience of automatic backup, backups can be set to run automatically at a selected time. Data is also accessible through a web browser from any location at any time creating seamless access to your data.

An assessment of the costs versus benefits of a range of data storage solutions should be undertaken in relation to the value of your data and documents. However, it is highly recommended for the safety and security of data that there is an element of offsite data storage involved in your backup plan.