Online backups are great for keeping a copy of all your important data off site. The reality of online backups are that they can take along time to restore a large amount of data. If you backup up 100gb of data to your online backup service it will take a long time to attempt to restore that data online. In many cases it is not practical to download that amount of data and you will need to have DVD’s or a USB drive shipped to you with your data on it. If you need to restore a large amount of data quickly the quickest method is still to have a local backup of your data.
Local backups of your data make it much faster to restore in the event of a hard drive crash, and they should not be forgotten about just because you have started backing up online. The best plan to restore your data is to have more than one method of backing up. Having both a local backup to an external hard drive can make a large restore much faster and easier. In the event that your local backup is not complete or has some corrupted data or other problems then you can do a smaller restore from your online backup.
Online backup has not made the need for local backups obsolete, they have simply made it possible for the average everyday person to have one backup stored securely off site. Lately I have been using two external hard drives for backing up data locally swapping out either drive each week. The drive that is not connected is stored in a firesafe safe I have onsite. I also run an online backup service on that machine and backup data from all of the computers in our house to it. That is then backed up online as well as to the external hard drive that is connected. That gives me four copies of our most important data, one on our local backup/file server, one on each external hard drive and one online. In the event I have a hard drive crash the first place I will attempt to restore from would be the local drives, and the online backup is there just in case I need it.
Many of the online backup services have a service to restore your data to you on DVD or a USB device. If you need to restore a large amount of data the cost of ordering your data in those formats is pretty small. Online backup in many ways is like insurance, you hope you never have to use it, but it is there just in case you do. That does not mean you stop doing local backups, it means you no longer have to store a copy over at your in laws house. If you are looking for an online backup service that can help you manage both your local backup and your online backup, IDrive recently released IDrive portable. I was impressed with it and you can use the software with other external hard drives to manage both your local and online backups. Hopefully we will see other online storage companies offering this type of service with their desktop clients.
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