Offsite Data Storage
McLeod County Historical Society uses Past Perfect Museum Software on its network computer system, like many small historical museums. In the last three years we have been adding a tremendous amount of digital media, i.e. photos and recordings, to the system. This has created some storage and backup problems for us. My board would like to explore the option of offsite memory storage, and was wondering if any other organizations have done this or have looked into it.
Thanks,
Lori Pickell-Stangel
Executive Director
Lori - As it turns out, one of the items on my to-do list is to figure out how much online backup services cost. Your query spurred me to do my research. I googled “online data backup services” and got 21,000,000 hits. I ran through a bunch of the links on the first page and found there are a number of things to keep in mind when investigating online backup services.
Cost is one consideration. Some services charge by the month, some by the year. Some offer unlimited data backup, some limit it to so many gigabytes per month. Some charge for each computer you need backed up, some offer bulk licensing for several computers. Most plans differentiate between server backups and computer backups.
In addition to cost, you’ll want to see how reliable the service is and how secure your data will be. What happens if the online backup service has a crash? Do they have a backup? Does the service seem like it’s going to be around for a while? Does it keep its system up-to-date? Is your data encrypted? Is the service easy for you to access? Can you access it from anywhere? Is the backup automatic or manual?
Does the service support your operating system? (Not all cover Macs. Most seem to cover a number of Windows operating systems, even older ones, but not all of them do, so you’ll want to check this.)
More questions than answers at this point, especially without any direct experience with a backup service. I’ll probably need to create a spreadsheet to do proper comparisons between the services.
Seems to me that all of us local history orgs are going to need this kind of service eventually. I wonder if it would be a good idea to create a cooperative to handle this … a Legacy Amendment grant project, maybe? Hmm.
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Comment by Mary Warner — October 1, 2009 @ 1:56 pm