Backing up: Do I have to?
Recently with the hurricane season rolling around, I’ve been going around to my clients to make sure they’re following the backup procedures and policies we put in place. (lots of P’s in that one). Not to my surprise, many of them had not backed up in a while. The range of excuses varied, from “I lost my flash drive” to “I haven’t done much since the last time I backed up”. Perfect. So I think to myself, what shall I do? Send a new flash drive? Not likely. The problem with flash drives, despite their convenience, is their convenience. Yes, I typed that correctly. As easy as they are to transport by you, they’re just as easy to lift and transport by someone else – perhaps a less than honest pocket picker. So you run your company backups to a flash drive, put it in your pocket and take it home. By the time you’re ready to back up at the end of the next day, you can’t find the drive. Now all of your financial information, confidential letters, sales information, customer information are out of your control and potentially in the hands of someone else. Flash drive backups are convenient but they’re not secure.
The other option is external hard drive backup. Who can lose an external hard drive? They’re pretty sizable, especially compared to a flash drive, and they hold huge amounts of data. Plug one of them into your server and run a backup, then – take it home? Every day? Probably not. After lugging one of them home a couple of times, you’re likely to lose interest in it. So they end up staying in the office, connected to your server. External hard drive backups are inexpensive, but they’re not convenient.
In the past year we’ve been developing a backup product that is convenient, secure and inexpensive. No easy task, mind you, but the end result is a pretty phenomenal thing. Branded Re-Stor, it is a backup product you can set and forget. Re-Stor Remote Data Storage uses an internet connection to back up your important files to a server offsite. The first thought that jumps into your mind is likely one of security – how safe is it to back up my files to an external server? A fair question. There are 2 types of encryption* going on with Re-Stor. Encryption of the data itself and encryption of the channel used to transfer the data to the remote server. You set your own backup key, and only you know the key. Should you lose that key, your data becomes inaccessible to everyone. There is no chance of resetting the key and downloading your data, once a backup set has been encrypted with a certain key, only that key can un-encrypt it. The system uses 128bit keys (used in most banks today) and is powerful enough to withstand most hacking attempts, given a reasonably complex key.
That is the future of backups, in a nutshell. Call Caribyte Inc. today at (246) 435-2222 and we’ll give you more information on Re-Stor and assess how it can work for you. The call is always free and it could save you thousands of dollars.
*for more information on encryption and how long it would take to crack a 128bit key, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack.