Data backups are essential for most of businesses today and for many reasons. Most of the time, a problem occurs leading to a collapse of the system in place and to get things up and running quickly, there is the need to fall on backup data within minutes. Many businesses have to grapple with situations like viruses and malware attacks, natural disasters such as fire, earthquakes, storms, floods, theft and other physical damage to their computers and storage devices.

In such situations, the problem is not about the loss of hardware, but the loss of vital information. Onsite backups are good but are not considered very safe due to some of the various reasons listed above. Most businesses are now adopting various offsite backup solutions including online backups due to the benefits that come with them.

Security

Offsite backups are considered to be more secure than onsite ones because they take the data away to a different location where it is kept safe. In that case, whenever there is a natural disaster onsite, the data is not lost. There is no guarantee that the backup data software on various media will be safe during fire, earthquakes and floods. But it is very unlikely that these disasters occur simultaneously in a remote storage venue.

Online backups encrypt data before exporting it to the server in another location. This helps to protect data from being accessed by third parties such as hackers. In as much as you don’t want to lose data, you also don’t want it to fall in the hands of criminals.

Apart from security, online backups have other benefits that ordinary offsite backups don’t have. Here are a few of them.

They are simple

Not much effort is necessarily needed for online backups. You only have to schedule times when the system should automatically perform the process of the backup. This gives you the freedom and the assurance that you are fully protected around the clock. You will not have to spend time copying files to storage media such as CDs flash drives and hard drives.

It is always possible for data stored in various offline media to get damaged or lost from where they are kept. But online data is protected against such issues.

Consistency

There is a synchronization feature in all the available online backup systems that allow changes made to existing files and documents to be automatically saved in the previous versions. That means all the information in the backup file or system is kept up to date.

Low cost

Using the online backup option saves a lot of costs as far your business is considered. In order to backup on tape drives, CDs and external drives, you will need to invest wisely in hardware and software to support whichever media you choose. Then you must constantly spend on the usable media as you store more and more data. There is a cost in transporting backup data to storage location which should be done by staff.  The usage of the online version of the offsite backup system takes away all these costs. Minimal human effort is needed for online backups.

These are just some of the reasons businesses are choosing offsite backup solutions over the onsite backup. This can be easily done by using any of the online backup script or software that are available on the net. But for yielding better results make sure that you have chosen a branded  and open source backup software