Geographic Diversification Of Your Backup Data
Geo Diversification Of Computer Backup Data
I was watching an episode of Season 8 of 24 a few days ago (yes, I was late to the Jack Bauer thing, but at least I can watch the episodes whenever I want) and had to smile when our buddy from the movie “Mad Money” showed up and wanted some video footage regarding a crime that would just happen to incriminate an employee of CTU.
Fortuitously for the bad apple employee, a terrorist EMP device wiped out CTU’s servers just in time (miraculously didn’t affect the big TV screens on the wall).
Naturally, our bearded authority figure asked about backups when told of the video footage destruction.
The answer?
“Naturally we have backups, unfortunately they were stored on-site and were wiped out also”.
Hmm. Yes it takes big data pipes to move video, but I think CTU has them.
If nothing else, it underscores a primary reason for an online backup service: Geographic diversification of your data.
Backing up is easy, with USB hard drives, thumb drives, etc. And many argue this as a reason they haven’t signed up yet for a quality, top rated online backup free account even (Get 5GB free here).
The problem, which we have written about before, is what happens when:
- A flood submerges your entire town/city/area
- A hurricane wipes out your entire town/city/area
- A fire detroys your entire town/city/area
- A tornado blows away a large swath of your town/city/area
- An EMP device goes off (thankfully, only in the movies so far)
or, if you don’t even have a USB backup at your bank, relative or friends house, but store all the backups in YOUR home or business:
- fire
- flood
- plumbing leak
- burglary
- sink hole (hey, that’s been happening!)
- tornado (sorry, used to live in the MidWest and feared the darn things)
Having another backup (or your only backup) on redundant servers in a geographically diverse area from where you live makes a LOT of sense and could even prevent you and your employees from losing your livelihood in the case of your business data.
This is called off-site backup, and to us is one of the most important features of online backup and the reason you don’t want to delay to get your data stored SECURELY (careful of those free services out there) in the cloud.
If you live in a large metro area it might make sense to make sure your online backup service does NOT have all of your data stored in your area; and MOST of the big names are geo-diversifying, though some cannot tell you exactly for sure that your data is redundantly spread out.
SugarSync is one of the few that makes a point of claiming that they DO geo-diversify your online backup data in the cloud.
Either way, though, it’s highly likely that you will be fine with any of the big names; check out our online backup review page and pick one that has the features that matter to you most.