Virtual On-Site Tech Support / Remote Assistance. Ottawa remote computer assistance.

The vast majority of computer users to-day know the importance of doing regular backups, however all too often we either forget, or put it off on account of workload - that of course is when disaster will strike!

There are many ways of backing up critical data. Common ways in use to-day are USB Flash Drives, external hard drives, and CD or DVD media, but they all suffer from one potentially fatal flaw - they require some operator intervention to insert or connect the backup media. Another backup method becoming increasingly popular is Online Backup which does not have this problem - you just set it and forget it!

Simply put, it is a very secure way of saving your critical data so that in the event of a catastrophe you can recover easily. Your important data is uploaded to a very secure server on the internet. Data is compressed and encrypted prior to transmission and also password protected to ensure complete privacy - it is like putting your most critical information into a safety deposit box! Then when the data is transmitted it is further encrypted using 128 bit SSL, the same as used for internet banking.

Adare Enterprises Inc. is affiliated with one of the most reliable, secure and cost-effective online backup providers available to-day.

What does it cost? At $18.00 per gigabyte per year it is very inexpensive. While 1 gigabyte may seem like very little in these days of terabyte (1000 gigabyte) hard drives, in reality the amount of hard drive space used for data is usually quite small. Most wordprocessing, spreadsheet, accounting and picture files are measured in kilobytes and don't take up much room. A single gigabyte is approximately 1000 pictures of 1 megabyte each - some pictures may be less, and some high resolution ones can be much more. Most hard drive space is occupied by the operating system and application programs, some of which can be quite large, and occupy many gigabytes.

Though a complete hard drive could be backed up online, we do not recommend it for the following reasons:

1. Because upload speeds are usually quite slow (usually < 2 mb/sec for cable and DSL) it can take a very long time.

2. Cost - why pay to backup applications for which you already have the installation media?

3. Using SOS Online Backup it is easy to do a local backup also. This can be done to an external hard drive, so you have a "snapshot" of your complete hard drive.

A common mistake is to keep local backup media near the computer. Unfortunately, this means that in the event of a disaster, the backup media can be lost or destroyed also. When SOS Online Backup is used, data is stored thousands of miles away, and is impossible to lose.

Try before you buy If you are interested in testing our Online Backup, please contact us by email or by phone at (613) 216-6102, and we will set up a 30 day free trial