Online Back-Up: Remote Control & Security – Even for Road Warriors

Online Backup Keeps Home Office & Telework Data Accessible on the Road — and Safe From the Storm

By David Friend, CEO, Carbonite, Inc.

‘Tis the season — for hurricanes and summer travel.

It always amazes me how so many business owners completely neglect the safety of the data on their computers. Or will travel without access to their documents.

Consider this:  during hurricane Katrina, more than 35,000 businesses had their computers ruined. According to U.S. Dept. of Labor Statistics, 40 percent of all businesses that have data disasters never reopen. Some 25 percent of the rest fail within two years.

In short, when you lose all your home office’s or small business records and files, you’re cooked.

And if you’re traveling and don’t have access to your data, files and records, it might as well be locked in a vault somewhere.

It’s likely that more than two-thirds of small businesses do back up their data regularly, but it’s almost always to external hard drives, DVDs or tapes.  Unfortunately, these are usually stored nearby. So if the computer gets flooded, so do the backups.

And they’re inaccessible from any remote location.

That’s why it’s so important to back up online where your data gets stored in a completely different part of the country (hopefully somewhere well away from the hurricane belt).

For that reason, online backup is the right solution for small businesses.   It’s less expensive than local solutions and gets your data far, far away.

How does online backup work?

A small downloaded program encrypts and compresses your files for privacy. It then transmits them over the Internet to the vendor’s data center.  Any time you change a file or create a new file, the online backup software immediately detects it and starts backing it up.

The nice thing about online backup is that it just works in the background. Right now I’m sitting in Boston’s airport, and my online backup is backing up this story as I’m writing it. I never have to remember to do a backup.

If your computer gets swamped this season, or hit by a tornado, an earthquake, or some other natural disaster makes it impossible for you to get to your office, you can get — or get to — all your files back with a few clicks.

If you’re travelling, you can access them from any computer. That means no more dragging your computer with you on trips.

Companies like Mozy.com, eVault.com, Connected.com and my company Carbonite.com offer an invaluable solution. Prices vary. But from around $55 per year, you get unlimited online backup – less than half the price of an external hard drive. Today, we have almost 30 billion files backed up – with more than 100 million new files added every day.  More importantly, we’ve restored over 2 billion files.

If you haven’t already, give online back up a try. Most vendors have free trials.

And you’ll sleep a lot better when that storm’s approaching.

David Friend is chairman and CEO of Carbonite Inc., a leading provider of online backup services.  He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded five other successful companies.  A Yale graduate and trustee for Berklee College of Music and Brookings Institution, Friend taught at MIT and has been featured in Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Forbes.