I like to think of online backup as the 21st century equivalent of a safety deposit box. It is a place where we can lock away all the things most precious to us for safe keeping. A little on the romantic side maybe, but fundamentally a safe place to store your most valuable items is exactly what online backup is. It just so happens that many of the things we hold dear now come in digital form which is what lead the need for a change.
Online backup can protect your files against a myriad of dangers as well as allow you to share you most precious moments, memories and achievements with others with ease. It also, much like a safety deposit box, is stored away from your home and needs a key to unlock it.
Online backup stores copies of your files in remote locations on servers monitored by your online backup provider. Often more then one copy is made and stored on different servers in order to reduce the chances of loss to 1 piece in 10 million years. I like to think of that as safer than a safe deposit box. By storing your data remotely you also reduce the risk of it falling foul of natural disaster or accident.
Online backup providers also use superior encryption devices to ensure the safety of your files whilst in storage. Encryption scrambles your data on upload and during storage in order for it to remain a mystery to hackers or pesky viruses. As stated previously in order to access these now scramble files you need a key to return them to their original state. This process happens on download. In businesses especially this can be a key, behind a password in order to monitor who is accessing your files.
While online backup doesn’t have the same romanticism about it as a safety deposit box full of stories and a lifetimes worth of memories, there is something magical about the idea of cloud storage.
