Overview of data storage companies!

• The operation is always complete.
• Data is available at all times.
• Data remains secure at an off-site location.

These data storage companies offer subscribers regular, automatic, remote data backup over the Internet to secure data media centers specially designed to withstand any computing and physical disaster. Where 24x7 monitoring and user support are always available.

Businesses of any sizes can take advantage of the state-of the-art data centers belonging to any of the many online Internet backup companies. These services offer safety to vital information and you can effectively use their services as a key component in your disaster recovery and business continuation solution plan.



To understand the concept better, lets review the services being offered by a few of the industry best acknowledged online storage companies.

Connected:
Connected use two mirrored data centers, one in the US and one overseas. The storage of their data centers are based on proprietary disk array design, each capable of storing more than 1.8 petabytes of data. This data storage company offers a variety of online backup service options to both SOHO users and SMBs.
DataProtector client agent is the company’s licensed version which is set-up in an encrypted connection to their remote servers and offers configuration wizards for file selection and scheduling process.
DataProtector can backup open files but doesn’t support open database backups. In order to that users have to use application-level backups methods for databases or email services and then they can archive the computer generated flat files online.
For incremental backups company uses two proprietary techniques namely Delta Block technology that selects only those blocks that have changed, while SendOnce technology creates a log of common files across multiple agents for initial full backup and then stores one copy of identical files.
On all subsequence backups it uses a reference pointer of the existing pool copy instead of storing a full new copy.

Ibackup:
The company has hosted its services at the mirrored office centers of Exodus Communications Internet Data Center at El Segundo (California). The agent uses 128-bit SSL encryption by default. In addition it uses Microsoft’s CryptoAPI to encrypt the files in the storage. Once an initial full backup is done, incremental transfer uses block-level comparison algorithm that transfers only modified file contents. The agent’s SnapShot feature allows you to capture views of data for point-in-time file restoration.
The agent can only perform backups of static data files and therefore fails to capture the dynamic system state or database files.
Logged in users can experience unprecedented access to their on-line data set, allowing them to edit (cut, copy, paste, delete) as if it were normally attached storage. You can publish data to public Web folders, restore to other systems and create sub accounts.

LiveVault:
LiveVault a data storage company offers currently several levels of storage solution against data loss. It is a provider of everything from short-term server backups to multiyear accounts for archival in data centers from IBM and Iron Mountain in the United States and BT in UK.
The LiveVault agent offers complete web based management. You can check the data from anywhere.
This makes remote backup-management easy to manage. All local-agent functions are available through an SSL browser session on any system. LiveVault apply 192-bit AES encryption password protection, digital certificates and electronic keys for the web access.
When the initial backup and synchronization is performed, incremental backups are managed using a byte-level comparison and only the changes are transferred. Continuous backups are also supported by LiveVault, where changed files are communicated to the backup at the offsite location as they’re saved on your local server.
This functionality is very useful for handling fast-moving transactional data severs for enterprises. The service also provides system emergency restoration capabilities and with agent configuration it performs a complete server backup along with open registry and system state configuration files.
LiveVault handles open databases, email and system files using its proprietary replication technology. With files with historical multiple iterations, LiveVault supports the availability of at least one historical each per day. This gives options for the customers to restore the most current version of the file or offer reviewing of its historical stored data for a specific restoration date.

Conclusion:
There are a large number of data storage companies offering online data services and most of them have some kind of retention policy. So before deciding on the selection of particular vendor service solution, it is worthwhile to examine with trials all its features.