You only realize the power of a backup when you lose your precious data.
While taking a local backup is the safest option, more and more people are leaning towards online backup. Simply because with cloud backup, you don’t have to invest in an expensive storage device that you would have to carry everywhere. With your data backed up on the cloud, you can access it anywhere, until and unless you have an internet connection
To help you out, we have put together five extremely helpful online backup and recovery tips
1. Calculate what and how much data you want to backup
Every online backup service is different from the other. While some backup services allow you to backup whichever files you want, some are not that lenient.
For instance, if you use Backblaze, it will automatically pick out the files that you are most likely to backup, it encrypts them and starts uploading them. On the other hand, online backup service like OpenDrive, lets you choose whichever file want to upload.
That is why, it is important to first select the data that you want to upload and see if the backup service you want to use does allow those file types.
2. Decide your budget
All the backup services have different pricing plans along with different storage limits and features. There are services which allow unlimited storage and there are services which provide great features. As they say, you cannot have the best of both worlds.
So after calculating how much data you want to backup, decide a budget and then check which services fall under your price range.
3. Choose if you want to share files or sync files
Its up to you to decide whether you want to share files with other users or sync files across all your devices so that the data can be accessed anywhere. There are many backup services which provide syncing. In fact, you will also find services that delete data from your device in case it gets stolen or misplaced.
4. Check the performance of the online backup service
Let’s be honest, not everyone has a great internet speed. But, your file uploading and downloading speed does not just depend on that. Every service takes a different time to upload and download files. This is because each service takes a different time to encrypt and transfer the files to its server. This could be a major factor when you have large amount of data files that need to be backed up.
5. Use a service with the most restoration features
The whole idea behind backing up your data is to be able to restore files when you have lost them. But if an online backup service makes it extremely difficult to restore files then it’s really not worth it. Choose a service that lets you find files from backed up data through a search tool. There are also many online backup services that can replicate the entire folder structure, which could be extremely helpful in case of a complete data loss. Another thing to consider here is the fact that whether you plan covers one computer or more than one, because you might have to transfer your account to a different computer to restore data.
