Best online backup program?

[ChristineCobb]

In my old investment advisory firm, we had to have a backup plan that passed SEC scrutiny. We had a server with RAID5 which just meant that we had 5 mirrored hard drives. We actually had the main drive fail twice in 14 years and it was easy to remove the bad drive and hook up one of the mirrored drives. Over the years, the cost of this setup has continued to decline.

Then we rented space on a server at a data center (similar to what Mozy and others use) and backed up to that server every night. These backups were incremental so that if a file was deleted or overwritten, we could retrieve the file from a previous day.

So effectively we had an on-site backup in case of hardware failure and a dedicated off-site backup to restore deleted or corrupted files or in the case of theft or fire in the building (or even a hurricane).

[rhelling]

correct me if im wrong...but arent my website fies backed up on my web host? ...and since im using dropbox computing so i have access to files anywhere...arent they (dropbox) backing up my information?

so....why would i need 'another' backup in place?

[rhelling]

Hey Gina...
Just looked at your homepage. FYI the links don't seem to be working...

[DebraLloyd]

I believe MozyPro do have HIPPA compliant security measures but would check with them to be sure before recommending from that perspective. Re their service it can't be beat in my experience. I signed up with MozyPro in 2008 and have had them ever since. I pay a fair chunk to auto back up everything on my system programs and all, about 15GB all together but it's worth every dime. The whole sorry tale is in this post http://nextgenbiztools.com/1445/smal...exy-organized/ but upshot is I now keep an external hard-drive with images and videos etc on it, my site autobacks up to Amazon S3 AND MozyPro.

Ok as we're swapping crash/backup horror stories here. I had built out a site for my Dad a few years ago (about 2005 so pre my discovering wordpress) and the hosting company was making some minor updates for me. THEY did NOT back up the site AND they corrupted all earlier backups so I lost the entire site and had to start over. My lesson was I don't trust any hosting company not to make the same stupid mistakes anyone else might.

In my offline business I used to keep A|B|C backups of QuickBooks just so I would have multiple backups as (also many years ago) I had a client who had a data failure and their 2nd back up got corrupted when they tried to restore.

The security measures in place are more than enough to protect your files in the cloud but it never hurts to have a local back up as well. I will admit I am not nearly as good at updating those as I have restored from Mozy and even used it to migrate to a new laptop too - worked like a charm.

Cheers,
Debra

[cindybidar]

rhelling - yes, your website files are backed up on your host, but that's really more of a convenience for them than it is for you. Just last summer I helped a client recover 45+ websites that were lost when her server suffered a catastrophic failure - both drives gone, no backups available. It might be rare, but if it's you, that won't matter much.

As far as DropBox goes - it's better than nothing, but with Carbonite (what I use) I can back up everything - not just the files I store there. So it backs up all my email, my iTunes, my pictures, etc.