Backing up your data to an online backup service is only one part of how to keep your data safe in the event of a hard drive failure or other major catastrophe. Restoring your data from your backup is the second major part. How you restore your data from your service is an important feature that people need to know before signing up for a service.
The majority of online backup services offer several ways to restore your data: client restore, web restore and in some cases a DVD or hard drive restore. The more options you have to restore your files the better. It provides you with more ways to make sure you recover all of your files.
The majority of services offer a client restore feature. Where you would install the software client on your new computer with your existing user name and password. Once this is done you then have access to the files that are backed up. You can choose which files to restore and the software client will download them for you. This is an easy and convenient way to restore your files, but it does have some problems. If you are restoring a large amount of data your restore can take a very long time depending on your Internet connection. If your ISP has bandwidth caps you can also run into problems of going over your bandwidth limits.
Web restores are similar to a client restore, except you would login to your services web control panel and request a file restore. Depending on the service your request can take some time to process and you will then be able to download your files. Like a client restore if you are restoring all of your files this can be time consuming, bandwidth hogging and difficult to download all of your data.
If you have lost all of your data and need to restore all of it ordering a DVD or hard drive restore is a great option. There are not many online backup services that offer this type of restore, Mozy and Backblaze are the only two currently. While it might cost a little extra to order this type of restore the cost is minor compared to losing all of your data. Combined with doing a client or web restore to get your most precious files back immediately and a DVD or hard drive restore you can be up and running again quickly. This will also not cause any issues with downloading large multiple files, or and bandwidth issues.
If you are investigating using online backup for your personal or business needs be sure to look into not only how your files are backed up to the service, but how you will get them back. If you are limited to only a software client and web restore be ready to spend time downloading your files and the problems that can create for large data restores.
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