Offsite Backup Services - How Long Will It Take?

Author: Sig Kappel

When backing up your data through the internet using an offsite backup service, your time of transfer is going to be dependent on the following two major factors: Your Upload rate, as provided by your internet service provider and the amount of data to be transferred.
When it comes to the internet connection speed, you should realize that most home and business do not have the "advertised" rate of service. For example, at the office and at home we use a local cable company's high speed connection that is advertised at 5Mb/s downstream and 1Mb/s up stream. In reality we average about 1.62Mb/sec downstream and 256kb/s upstream.
What about the amount of data to backup. I suggest to anyone that uses an offsite backup service to only backup data that has real value. This is the stuff that you cannot afford to lose, and that fairly easy to identify; just ask the question "what data would seriously impact my business if I were to lose it?" this should bring up some serious considerations.
Now that you identified the data of value, it's time to back it up. Great, with your internet provider this should only take an ETERNITY! Not to worry, yes the initial back-up transfer time can take a reasonable amount of time, but to reduce time spent on transfer most backup providers software will compress your data (not to mention encrypting for security) before sending; that helps.
Here's the real good news, the software used to do the backups after the initial backup session will be real quick, because the data transferred will only be what has changed. This makes the daily backup only a small fraction of the full backup.
When it comes to the time spent on backing up it's worth that investment, besides your computer is doing the work, go relax your data is being secured.
Sig Kappel is a Computer Engineering Technologist and Lead architect of the JetBack Offsite Backup Service You'll find more information on Jetback Offsite Backup Services at http://www.jetback.com

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