Anyone who has had the experience of losing data from their computer can testify to the significance of online backup. Sometimes, something completely out of your control such as a power outage or surge can cause you to lose significant amounts of data. Other times, you make a mistake and end up deleting something you thought was saved. The result of the loss can range from a minor annoyance to a loss of a full day's worth of work and therefore income.

One of the most important assets as far as a person or a business is concerned is the data that we have accumulated over a period of time. They may be accounting records, your contacts and the correspondence and letters, details regarding contracts, various photos, or something else which is of immense value to an individual or business.

The cost of a computer itself does not reflect the whole value of it. What is more important is the value of information saved in the computer. This information can be work or business related records. This brings up the invention of remote backup.

As you may know, some things are beyond our control. These unexpected happenings can destroy data or, sometimes, even your computer itself. Examples of these sorts of calamities include: a collapsed hard drive, data corruption, natural disaster, sabotage and mistakes by users. These are all real dangers and can very easily result in the loss of years of hard work and could even lead to a business collapsing entirely.

In the event of data loss it becomes very important that the individual or business had some sort of disaster recovery plan. There are many risks to not keeping a copy of your work either on-site in a local backup or off-site in an online backup. Without some sort of disaster recovery plan you're almost guaranteeing a headache for someone when they go looking for a file that isn't there and can't be recovered because someone didn't do their backup. The benefits of an off-site online backup is in the event of pretty much any disaster you can retrieve your data with only a little effort on your behalf.

The traditional means of data backups are backing up all the data to tapes. You can use external drives, DVDs and CDs also. These techniques are very dreary, time consuming and erratic. Various studies have shown that more than 50% of the tape restores usually fail. And, to safeguard against adversities like flood, robbery, fire etc the backup files should be stored at a different location. But this is ignored most of the time.