Data Backup

[ableitc]

I working on a possible new business idea with a friend of mine, an IT guru who has recently been made redundant, and wanted some advice and thoughts.

Firstly do you regularly backup data on your PC ?

Secondly do you know how to backup your email stored in Outlook ?

If a company was to provide an on-site service were they visited your premises every week, backup your data (including emails, etc), run a anti-virus and anti-spyware scan would you be willing to pay £12.49 per week for this ?

I understand this is obviously a more costly alternative to online backup but we would provide the additional services of anti-virus and spyware. Plus we have the knowledge to backup applications and emails.

Thanks in advance.

 

[apeebles]

Hi,

If that is for the office then I could be tempted. However per PC that's going to be way too much imho.

Alistair

 

[Astaroth]

Yes, both as our dataserver is running on RAID configuration so we have a built in backup and we also have an external drive which we run weekly backups on and store off site. Anti-virus etc software runs constantly and does a full network sweep weekly.

Price doesnt sound to bad again, as above, if it is on a per office or server basis. Are you going to be supplying the media that the data is stored to?


The main thing would be that for paying for this service I would expect a guarantee on the data security both in terms of access to our confidential data and secondly that if we did have a data loss that your backup successfully restores it. I would imagine the insurance to cover this could be very high given the potential values involved in the content of the backup.

 

[Deleted member 3454]

I working on a possible new business idea with a friend of mine, an IT guru who has recently been made redundant, and wanted some advice and thoughts.

Firstly do you regularly backup data on your PC ?

Secondly do you know how to backup your email stored in Outlook ?

If a company was to provide an on-site service were they visited your premises every week, backup your data (including emails, etc), run a anti-virus and anti-spyware scan would you be willing to pay £12.49 per week for this ?

I understand this is obviously a more costly alternative to online backup but we would provide the additional services of anti-virus and spyware. Plus we have the knowledge to backup applications and emails.

Thanks in advance.

1. Yes.

2. Yes.

3. No.

I backup my system in two ways - to an external hard drive and online. Both backups happen automatically and include Outlook. My online backup costs $49.95 for twelve months unlimited storage with incentives (one month free) for each person I recommend that signs up. My system is well protected with regularly updated anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions and my anti-virus and anti-spyware costs about $50 per annum. Your offering (£12.49 x 52 weeks) equates to £649.48 per year.

Maybe there are people who would be willing to spend that much but I wouldn't.

Hope that helps.

 

[R1chard]

Wow $49.95 with unlimited storage is very cheap! Incidently is that a US company and are they covered by the Data Protection Act?

I think for the online backup solutions the key is ease of use... theres also a lot of issues with connectivity so would this work well with low bandwidth users?

A better option for myself would be a nice bit of software that co-ordinated/mirrored servers or desktops easily ie so given folders on my laptop would be synchronised with my desktop at home etc.

 

[AlphOmega]

I see the idea but there may be other issues with this.

Firstly some of my data I would certainly not want a third party backing up and having a copy of it.

If this backed up data contains client information where would the data protection act stand especially if it was payment details?

 

I dunno if it is a viable business on its own. Personally, I give backup advice, etc to my customers as standard (for free) at the end of a service call or suchlike. They then sort it out themselves. I cannot see any of them wanting to pay for this service.

I dunno about your own area though - maybe they would go for it. But, why not complement it with a number of other IT related services? At least that way you will have some additional form of income until you can get this side off the ground.