There are many disaster recovery tools and strategies available, here we discuss some of the pros and cons compared to Active Rescue for Data.

Internet only backup

Assuming a basic broadband internet connection of 2Mbit/s download and 256Kbit/s upload, our minimum recommended speed:

• You could upload a little over 100 MBytes per hour and download 900 MBytes per hour.
• To upload 500 GB online would take 6 months.
• Your internet connection would be saturated interfering with normal business use.
• It would take over 3 weeks constant downloading to retrieve it all in a disaster situation.

Offline backup

Traditionally this meant computer tapes written daily and moved off site to a physical storage facility daily or weekly. Nothing wrong with this, it's just that the tape libraries tend to be expensive, as does the tape collection/storage contract, and it may require full time staff trained in this sort of operation.

As soon as any individual tape is off site it starts aging and becoming less and less valid as the data stored is made obsolete by new files, file edits, deletions etc. This is why tapes must be sent off-site daily to keep up.

Hybrid Online/Offline

With Active Rescue for Data we use the off-line removable disk to store the bulk of the backup and we use the Internet only to store the daily updates.

We only need to store two weeks of updates so the overall upload and download volumes stay small, we use your internet connection overnight when it does not interfere and download times in a crisis stay short.