Online data backup can be broadly described as a methodology through which data is backed up on a regular basis at some offsite or a remote server which is typically maintained and hosted by your service provider.
Nowadays, it is necessarily the cloud-based back up which works the best. In earlier times, it was simply worked up as backing up of the complete data to the service provider’s designated location. Later on, the term cloud backup was coined. Now, in case of online backups, eventually, it is being saved onto some cloud only.
It is, in fact, a separate service for which the service provider charges the user with some amount of money. The price is typically dependent upon various factors like capacity, backup size, user count, bandwidth etc to name a few.
Small and medium-sized business houses with a limited IT structure and technological capacities majorly opt for the service of online backups including office 365 data backup. On the contrary, a business firm might even own its own server at some offsite or remote location, designated purely to take care of backups over the net.
Some of them might also take the help of software to further fasten up and streamline the process of network backup.
How it works
A software-based online backup works automatically. It copies the data on a periodic basis or as per the scheduled timeline over a secure network connection. This backed up data can later can be restored by the user in case of any eventuality.
The frequency of the backup depends upon the backup service package purchased by the consumer.
There are multiple ways for an organisation to get its data backed up on a regular basis. Some of these are listed as under for better understanding:
- The most widely followed method is simply streaming of the data over the secure network connection. Now, this procedure can take time depending upon the size of data, transfer speed etc. If you have large data to be copied, it can take up to a week’s time as well for the initial backup to compete at the remote offsite server.
- The second method is cloud seeding. This service is generally offered by cloud backup providers and is more viable in case the quantum of data to be copied is very high. Here, the company simply sends a physical disk at the consumer’s location for the copying purpose. The disk is then shipped back to the provider which is further used to copy the data onto their server. Now, going forth, the changed blocks of the data are only streamlined and copied during the process of periodic backups.
Data Restoration
It is a process of copying back the data from your backup stored online at some remote offsite place and restoring it back to its original or some new location. Restoration procedure using services like Gmail recovery is usually performed in an eventuality like sudden loss of data at the location, crashing of the software or some untoward damaging which has led to the breakdown.
Having a secure offsite backup keep your data secure even when some major crash happens at your end.
