Online data backups such as Mozy, Carbonite, IDrive, Amazon S3 and others provide excellent protection for your data.  We use Amazon S3 ourselves.  But, as this time, we still strongly recommend an on-site backup as the primary backup method and online backup only as a secondary solution. 

Case in point, one of our clients (a small office) only uses Mozy for their data backup.  Long story short, their server died and we are restoring data temporarily to one of the desktops until the server is replaced.  It’s now going on hour 28 of restoring the data from Mozy and it’s not all that close to finishing.  This is not unique to Mozy, other online backup providers have the same kinds of issues when restoring large amounts of data – it works, but can take a looong time.  Here’s a good article that goes into more detail about why online restores often take so long.  Had there been an on-site backup, we could have restored the data in less than an hour.  Online backups are great for large disaster recovery and small amounts of data may be restored quickly but it’s best to have an on-site backup such as external hard drive, tape drive or network attached storage device as the primary backup method.

About the author: Brian Cluxton is the Vice President of Affinity Consulting – Columbus and manages the hardware installation and Managed Services departments.  bcluxton@affinityconsulting.com