Penny wise… Pound foolish
Posted By jsklavounos
Date: April 5th, 2009
Category: Comparison
Hello again,
During conversations over the past few weeks I’ve seen an interesting pattern develop regarding the cost of baking up your data.
Many people assert that the price of backing up data securely and off-site is too high, but the reality may surprise you.
As an example, baking up your Quickbooks file, some important spreadsheets and documents, and maybe an Outlook PST file could be backed up in about 4 GB’s worth of space. This (at www.nationaldataprotect.com) will cost about $40 per month - $480 per year.
Think about the cost of trying to recover your information from a crashed hard drive… these services can run into thousands of dollars with no guarantee of success.
Now consider the cost of external hard drives for backup. These are relatively inexpensive - you can pick up a 250GB backup drive for around $150. But the problem here is that the drive is sitting right next to the data that you’re protecting. A bad move if you want to be able to recover after a problem like flood, fire or any other environmental problem.
There are even some backup services that charge you some minimal amount per year, but these are consumer services that frankly don’t cut it for your business. These services only keep one copy of your files. Meaning that if you need to recover a specific version (maybe one that has not been damaged by a virus) you’re out of luck.
You can choose a combination of the above mentioned services, but then you’re adding complexity that will come back to haunt you when you need to recover some data.
Take a look at the feature matrix and I think you’ll see that your choice is clear.
| NDP | Drive Recovery | External Drive | Combo Strategy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Immediate recovery | Yes | No | Yes | Maybe |
| Go back to another version | Yes | No | Maybe | Maybe |
| Data is secure | Yes | No | Probably not | Probably not |
| Guaranteed | Yes | No | No | No |
| Monitored | Yes | No | No | No |
| Automatic | Yes | No | Yes | Maybe |
| Privacy regulation compliance | Yes | No | No | No |
| Simple | Yes | No | Maybe | No |
National Data Protect is flexible, reasonably prices and feature rich. I hope you consider it.
All my best,
John
