It might sound dramatic, but all hard drives fail eventually. Just like any machine, over time they get worn out and tired. Which is perhaps particularly concerning for businesses that rely solely on these drives to backup company data. And hard drive degeneration is just one of the reasons it is worth considering switching physical hard drives for cloud backup.
There are numerous other reasons too, and Dave Robinson, IT Manager at Flexseal, realised this a couple of years ago when he signed up for cloud backup. “I still use an external hard drive on-site, but cloud is my off-site ‘force majeure’ tertiary backup so that our Disaster Recovery Policy worst case scenario is 24-hours data loss. Before using cloud, at the end of the day we’d have to change the hard drives over manually, which was a pain – not to mention the fact the hard drives were still then stored on-site in a fire safe. You also always run the risk of staff forgetting to change the hard drives or remembering to put them in the safe.”
Unsurprisingly, cloud backup makes backing-up easier. But – if the worst were to happen – it also makes restoring data easier. Dave adds: “Another reason we started using cloud backup was the fact someone could be on-site with our full backup within 8 hours if needs be. I sleep better at night knowing that if the building burns down or floods I still have all our data backed-up externally. It also allows our Disaster Recovery Policy to be a lot more robust.”
So, having said all that, would he recommend it? “Without a doubt. It takes the manual error out of the process and means the business is covered for all eventualities of a severe data loss.” And if that isn't reason enough to make the switch, Resolve MD, Andrew Seaton, also highly recommends it, saying: “It is automatic, reliable and provides peace of mind that your data is safe.”
