Local or cloud backup?

Offsite backups, which normally come in the form of backups that are stored in the cloud, have some very clear and distinct advantages over locally stored backups. Imagine if your business premises suffered a flood or a fire, it doesn't matter how many backups sets you have, if they were kept at the same premises, you have lost everything. Likewise, with a burglary, if the thieves happened to steal your server and backups!

However, cloud backups also have distinct disadvantages; as anybody who has ever tried to restore a lot of data from the cloud location will testify. We were required to restore 360Gb of data for one of clients last year. They had a 45Mbps internet connection, so the restore took all day. Many clients have more than 360Gb of data, so restoring their data would have taken more time. This is far from ideal.

So, the best solution is to keep both onsite and offsite backups, both fully synchronised with each other. Onsite backups can be used 99% of the time because they are much faster. For disaster situations like fires, floods or a burglary, the cloud backup can be fallen back on.

Cloud backups and GDPR

If you are backing up to the cloud, you must ensure your provider is GDPR compliant. Many backup services are located in the USA. There is a misconception that this makes them non-GDPR compliant, but this is untrue. If the provider complies with the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Frameworks as set forth by the Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of Personal Data from European Union member countries and Switzerland then the provider is meeting GDPR compliance.

Itelica provide both onsite and cloud backup for only £15.00 a month, which includes unlimited storage. Our cloud backup is fully GDPR complaint as prescribed by the European Commission. Please visit our backup page here.