When you decide to choose an online backup service, there are a variety of factors that you need to consider before making your final decision. Keep in mind that you will placing your personal or business data on someone else’s hard drive for storage. That means that you will need to do your best to ensure that you choose a company that will protect your data at all times. You also need to consider issues like cost, amount of data being stored, and other more technical issues as well. Here is a closer look at what you need to know before your buy an online backup service.

1. Company History

The first thing that you need to know is the history of company that you will be using. There are a variety of different things that you can learn with a quick company background. One thing to consider is how old or established the company is. The older the company is, the more likely it will be around in 10 years. If you choose a young company with a small market share, there is a chance that they will go out of business in just a few years. There are two big problems with this. The first is obvious, you will have to find another backup service to use. The second is much more pressing. It is what happens to your data once the company closes down. More than likely it will be left on the hard drive and whoever purchases it at auction, will then access to all of your data. When looking into the companies history, it is also a good idea to see if they have a track record of abusing customer data, for example selling their customers personal information to advertising agencies. The more willing a company is to sell your information the farther away from them you should run.

2. Data Safety

When it comes to data safety there are a number of variables that you can look at. One of the most common things to look at is the data center in which all of your information is stored. You need to make sure that the data center has a good track record in terms of physical security as well as online security. You should also make sure that your data is held on a server that has a high uptime. If your server is offline at the wrong time, then it may miss your last backup or even worse, your computer could crash and you may not get access to your data, which means that you cannot restore your computer as soon as you need it. Rather you have to wait until the server comes back online. You should also make sure that you have some level of control, most often by the use of personal encryption keys, to ensure that even if something does happen to your server, such as it gets hacked into, you still can rest assured that your data is secure.

3. The Numbers

A final consideration that is very important is a laundry list of numbers. One of the most important numbers is price. It doesn’t help to have a backup service if you cannot afford to pay for it and your account soon gets canceled. You also need to consider how much data you will be storing because this will often directly tie to your price as well as ensure that you are allocated even disk space to hold all of your information.

While there are a number of different pieces of information that you absolutely must have before choosing an online backup service, these 3 areas tend to be the most important – company history, data safety, and “the numbers”. By having the proper information about all of these areas, you will be able to make a decision that will keep you satisfied over long term.

Author Bio: Jason Kay recommends reading reviews and ratings of the best online backup services to choose the right one for you.

Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: online backup, remote online backup, data backup