Backing up business data is not a new concept. Since the late 1970s, businesses have used a variety of approaches to backup their essential data. Each option provides significant advantages and disadvantages to your business.

Regardless of which method you use, it's essential to backup your information in a secure offsite location. No matter how effective your backup methods are, if they're stored at your location the data will still be at risk if a natural disaster hits your office or your system becomes infected with a virus.

The most traditional approach is to make physical backup copies of the data and contract a storage center to make regular pickups. This can be done on tapes, DVDs, or other removable storage media. These methods are generally inexpensive at first, but may require expensive hardware, if you don't have tape backup drives or DVD burners. They can also be demanding on your employees' time and productivity.

External backup drives and RAID servers (redundant array of inline disks) are useful, automated means of creating backups that can help you recover from most disk failures. However, they don’t give you an offsite backup option to protect against viruses or natural disasters.

Remote data backup encrypts your data and sends it over a secure Internet connection to a data storage house. You don't need any special equipment other than a high-speed Internet connection, and you can schedule automatic backups as frequently as needed. It's also relatively inexpensive making it the best option for small to mid-sized businesses. Be aware that if your network connection goes down, you won't be able to make a backup or recover data. Submit a free remote backup request for quotes to get matched to multiple vendors.