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Online Backups are Great, But

The advantages of online backups are well known; the online backup service providers make sure we know about them - off-site storage, no media management, no media spanning issues, fully automated, file sharing, access from any location, security, and so on. Less well broadcast is the down side to online backups. They are few, but they could be significant.

Lack of Depth to Online Backups

With the more traditional media based backups, those taking backing up their valuable data seriously will transport their media to a remote location and leave it there - for ever. This is to give depth of protection, so that a problem undetected for, lets say, 6 months doesn't get copied over the whole of a three month backup cycle leaving them with no clean backups from which to restore.

Probably the biggest single drawback with using online backups is that most online backup providers limit storage to 90 days. You may find someone willing to provide more than that but you will definitely not find one willing to talk in terms of years. You can get around it by downloading that file, and then uploading it again to get another 90 days of storage - or you can copy it to media.

Your Online Backup Provider May Vanish

One of the advantages of online backups is the freedom from worry about your media degrading, becoming obsolete, or no longer being compatible with your recently upgraded software. Instead, you can worry about your online backup provider dot-bombing, leaving you in limbo when you suddenly find that they no longer exist.

When choosing an online backup provider, look a bit deeper than the feature list, storage capacity, and cost. Look into the business background as well; find out how long have they been around, if they have backing from a large well established name in another field of IT, and do some searching to find out if there are any horror stories connected with them. Do not deal with anybody who doesn't reveal a physical address.

Online Backup of Multiple Computers

If you have more than one PC, an office desktop and a traveling laptop for instance, you may run into problems with an online backup. Many online backups are computer specific - one computer, one account. Any computer you wish can access the files, but only one can be backed up.

On a network you can get around this by copying all the files you want to backup to a single hard drive and backing up from there, but this is less reliable and you will lose some features, such as the ability to manage file versions.

File Size Limitations in an Online Backup

On traditional media, the file size is limited by the media capacity and to go beyond that needs media spanning software and a human on standby to swap media. Online backups bypass all these problems, offering fully automated backups without media and practically unlimited capacity.

Online backups do have a limit to the individual file sizes though, dictated by the addressing scheme employed by the online backup provider. The usual 32-bit addressing scheme limits the maximum file size to 3.6 GB.