Posted By rpineres
Hey Everyone,
I had an interesting issue come up just recently. A business searching for a data backup solution contacted us and challenged our service with another provider they had found over the web. Apparently this provider advertised $50.00 to back up 20GB of data per month. Naturally, I was surprised — there’s no way something could be that affordable AND secure.
I went ahead an made my way to the site to see this for myself. The advertised price was there in big, bold letters. By this point, I’m starting to think I’m in the wrong line of business. Then I get to the actual checkout. This backup provider pulled a fast one on the business that called us earlier. Had they actually gone through with the purchase, they would have seen the charge they slipped in at the end. Yes, the service is priced as advertised: $50 a month for 20GB. *cough* And a couple thousand dollars to buy the equipment it will be backed up to. To top it all off, their “geographically separated” data centers turned out to be in the same physical location. I’ll bet the business wasn’t too happy about that discovery.
Moral of the story: Watch your data but also keep a close eye on your wallet! There are plenty of backup providers out there but only National Data Protect will be able to guarantee the works: full encryption through the entire backup process, data archiving, set-it-and-forget-it ease of use, afforadble pricing and more!
Sincerely,
Ryan
Posted By jsklavounos
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
Posted By jsklavounos
Hi Everyone,
I’m baaaack! Thanks for being patient with my extended absence. There’s currently alot of buzz about free backup services on the web. Please try to remember a couple of the following things before you jump into one of them.
- Is the primary purpose of the service to protect your important information or to sell advertising? I’d rather have backup experts than marketing experts saving my data.
- What is the privacy policy of your backup provider? Many reserve for themselves the right to rummage through your data looking for inappropriate content. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sit too well with me.
- Are there “gotchas” like charges for restores? I’d hate to be held hostage to a company that is now demanding money for what was supposed to be a free service.
- What are the data size limits? Be sure that your Outlook data store (.pst or .ost) file can be recovered. If it is in use will it back up properly?
- Where are the data actually stored? Anyone can call a room full of servers a “data center” - do they have physical, as well as electronic security, in place? How about environmental factors like power and cooling?
I hope this helps you make an informed decision. Not all solutions are for all situations.
All my best,
John