From today onwards all online backup trials will allow up to 10Gb of backup. Full 24 hour support including telephone, email and remote is available for the trial period. If you require more space, please ask.

It has just been announced that back in May, Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council lost a memory stick containing details of 18,000 residents. Worst still was that fact that this information was unencrypted.

The council was found to be in breach of The Data Protection Act. A report found that steps were not taken to ensure that staff were trained in basic encryption methods.

Many small businesses use memory sticks as a form of backup for their company. Whilst they are quick and convenient, they suffer from the following drawbacks:

• Not automatic and labour intensive
• Only keeps one copy of a file. What happens if you need to restore a file from 10 days ago?
• Not encrypted – unless you use third party software
• Limited storage space
• Can be easily lost

BackupVault Online Backup addresses all of these shortcomings  and more. Sign up for a free online backup trial today to see the difference it can make for your business.

Whilst hurricanes are rare in the UK, they still do happen. Whilst your business can be insured against physical damage by natural disasters – have you thought about protecting you critical business data held on your PCs and servers?

BackupVault Online Backup is a fast, secure and easy to use solution. With prices starting from as little as £10 per month, can you afford not to be protected?

But an often overlooked part of a business is the data that it creates. Whilst you can purchase “E Risks Insurance”, the fact is that money can often never replace lost computer data.

Many small/medium businesses do not back up their data at all. Of the rest that do, they often overlook laptop computers run by their sales team – containing critical company information. It is estimated that one in ten laptops are lost/stolen during their lifetime.

Businesses need to consider how to protect their digital assets. BackupVault Online Backup is quite simply “data insurance for your business”. Our backup service will ensure that your data is protected each and every day from any number of threats, leaving you to manage and run your business.

Automation
Whilst the software used by tape backup is automatic, the physical loading/unloading of tapes is not. Over the course of a year, this can take up considerable (and expensive) man-hours. By comparison, online backup is completely automatic – the entire process is managed by the client software and storage platform.

Security
Data is typically stored on tape in an unencrypted format. If these tapes are ever moved offsite (which they should be for offsite protection) there will be a security risk. BackupVault Online Backup is encrypted using a key known only to you even before it leaves your computer/server. It is fully encrypted whilst being transmitted over the Internet and remains encrypted on our servers.

Offsite Backups
Tape backups require them to be physically moved to an offsite location – preferably every day. This obviously takes time and the location is rarely secure. Online Backup is by its very nature “offsite” and therefore you data is protected from any number of physical threats.

Level of capital expenditure
There is a high initial cost to tape backup solutions. All the hardware needs to be purchased along with associated tapes and cleaning media. Staff training costs are also very high. There are also a number of hidden costs such as weekly testing of the backup and replacement of hardware. With Online Backup you simply pay for what you use on a monthly basis.

Scalability
Should your data requirements increase you may be forced to purchase additional hardware and software. BackupVault Online Backup grows with you from a few Gb to many terabytes of data.

Ease of restoration
To find even a single file from a tape backup typically takes many hours and sometimes days. With online backup this restoration time can be minutes. Even with a complete disaster data can be restored in a few mouse clicks.

Future proof
We continue to invest in our storage and infrastructure to provide you with the very best in data protection. As tape backup methods evolve you may be left with obsolete hardware and software in a short period of time.

There are many other critical issues associated with Tape Backup. The fact is that tape backup is prone to human and hardware error. All it takes is one tape to be labeled incorrectly and a whole backup can be compromised.

For a simple monthly fee, BackupVault can eliminate all these issues connected with your backup and leave you with a comprehensive, secure and offsite backup solution. For a free, no obligation online backup trial contact BackupVault today on 020 3102 0040.

The aim of World Backup Day is to raise awareness of backups and just as important – restoring of data. Do yourself a favour today and check that your backup method is working and you can restore data.

Why should I backup I hear you ask? Well for starters hard drives fail, and if it isn’t backed up then its gone. New hard drives have a failure rate of 3 percent. The older the drive gets the more likely it is to fail too. There are also other ways of losing data such as viruses, physical problems such as fire/flood, theft and many more.

The three most common methods of backing up are:

USB/Hard Drive/DVD
Tape Drive
Online Backup

Only online backup is secure, automatic and offsite. If you have an online backup account with BackupVault you can be rest assured your data is safe. Our customers can restore any file/folder in as little as three mouse clicks – can you?

The other 45Gb was mainly music and movies downloaded from the Internet. I advised to backup the 5Gb to BackupVault and backup the other 45Gb to an external hard drive.

This way the most important work related files were protected offsite. When choosing which files to backup you need to ask yourself which files are the most important to you.

Of course with BackupVault it is easy to select/deselect files from the backup program – so you are always able to protect what is most important to you.

We advise against backing up operating system files and other programs that can be easily replaced – but it is only you that can decide what is most important.

Not only emails, but users have reported that their contacts have gone missing too. In a statement, Google said: “This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we’ve already fixed the problem for some individuals.”

Google eventually “found” the missing email and contacts – from a very handy backup. A lesson to us all about the importance of a reliable backup method in business.

Unfortunately it has been reported that hundreds of homes and businesses in the region have lost irreplaceable emails, documents, photos and other files from the flood.

Even if you backup to tape, disk or USB stick – ensure that this is stored offsite in an alternative location. Should the worst happen you will have a backup. Of course, with BackupVault Online Backup your backups are automatically saved to our servers offsite. Our backups are also backed up every 30 minutes too!

Instead of fumbling around with disks and USB memory sticks to make a backup – why not try our online backup? Sit back knowing that your emails, files, databases, customer contacts and other important information is backed up and secure.

BackupVault Online Backup is secure, completely automatic and offsite. We are offering a free 14 day trial for you to fully test the service too. Go on, make online backup your great new years resolution.