Data Backup and Data Recovery

In today’s environment, we are all susceptible to loss of property due to either wind, flooding, fire, theft, or possibly just forgetfulness. When it comes to the technologies that we rely on so heavily, we often overlook protecting our digital property such as photos and important documents despite the relative ease to make a data backup.

There are several options to back up our data such as external hard drives, flash drives, and cloud storage. Most people know what an external or flash (usb) drives are, but I get a lot of questions about cloud storage. A Cloud Backup or Cloud Storage is just a group of hard drives that are maintained by a company such as Google. The end-user can connect to the cloud server via the internet and upload and download data from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, so having important documents in the cloud can save you a lot of headache in the event of flood, fire, theft, or otherwise. In addition to the convenience of global access to your data, cloud storage is also more secure than a local backup.

Losing your data in the cloud is almost impossible because the cloud company also backs up their servers (a set of hard drives your data is stored on) to other servers in different locations. For example, if Google’s main cloud servers where destroyed by a catastrophic event, such as an earthquake, your data would still be safe and accessible online from one of their other severs located in a completely different location. So, you don’t have to worry about losing your data, but how safe is cloud storage from theft?

We have all heard about security breaches to online data, so you may be wondering how secure the cloud is compared to your own backup device? The bottom line is that no system is 100% safe from unauthorized access. Hackers gain access by exposing vulnerabilities in a system, and every system is vulnerable to infiltration by hackers, so we have to ask ourselves; whose system has the least vulnerabilities from hackers? Albeit, a multi-million dollar system owned and operated by a company such as Google will be more secure and have less vulnerabilities then your own laptop or thumb drive, but they also are more likely to be targeted by hackers than the average person’s personal computing devices. Fortunately, your personal files can be encrypted with password protection, providing yet another level of security.   If a hacker did gain access to your data in the cloud, they would still need the password to decrypt the files. In addition to security of your data in the cloud, you also need to consider the ability to access that data.

There are several cloud based data storage services and companies to choose from, each offering different storage limits at different prices. If you would like assistance with choosing the right service for your needs, setting up your cloud account or help with uploading your data and/or encrypting your confidential data with password protection, or creating a local backup on a thumb drive or external hard drive, please contact me for an appointment.

There’s always that chance that your internet is down, or there is a catastrophic event that leaves you without internet access. So, in addition to cloud storage I suggest also keeping a local backup, (i.e. external hard drive or flash drive), of at least your most important files.