Many think it is only businesses that need to be concerned with data loss. One not to bright former business owner came to conclusion of how important his data was to him – how his financial fortune of himself, his business and his families welfare all depended on his data and its safety as well as security. He would lament “Only when I have my server will I be able to sleep at night”.

Two factors are missing here. One is that nothing but nothing takes the place of off site storage. It is all about redundancy and more redundancy. Data can be backed up in any of a number of ways and means. Data recovery professionals state that IT security standards call for at least three individual different backups. So called the father, son and grandparent. If one goes down or is corrupted then there are the two others to work and retrieve vital info from.

Many owners and employees go home with a USB stick safely around their neck or inside their purse. All it takes is a loss of the USB flash drive , mechanical damage or a simple magnet in a purse clasp to erase or make the data unreadable or unusable in the case of a computer program data restore operation. On top of that USB memory sticks, although very impressive in storing large amounts of software information in a very small space and working very rapidly as well as silently are not without breakdowns or attacks by malicious viruses or spy-ware/greyware/malware out to do great damage.

You can never be too careful and have too many backups.

What formats are available for your backup assortment and collections.

First as stated are the USB memory sticks. Have not one but several. These must be taken “offsite” every day in rotation as well. Fire theft or vandalism could reduce the value or availability of these restores storage devices. Next are external physical hard drives. These are attached to the USB port of the computer and are set in Windows XP Professional or the various business forms of Microsoft Vista and Windows 7 too automatically and silent backup the system or integral data. These of course can be swapped and rotated to be removed offsite as well.

Lastly with the great speed and power of high speed broadband internet off-site, private and highly secure encrypted forms of automated backup are available again to automatically and conveniently do the backups all by themselves. Your hard earned data and information is safely and most securely stored in a remote location – safe from perils. Just to reassure you the data is generally encrypted in a high tech form that makes it unreadable and unusable to anyone else should it accidentally fall into the wrong hands. The service is called “Remote Online Data Backup”. Currently a plethora of various commercial and even non profit organizations will supply you or your firm with this data backup and recovery service.

In the end when it comes to the safety of data both for business as well as personal use, you can never be too prepared, too safe or have too many backups.