I have previously written about doing online backups (Back it Up - Twice), but I wanted to go over it again and stress how important backups are and why I now think that doing your backup online (or cloud backup) is the #1 way to go.

In the past week I've had two experiences where files were lost and needed to be restored. Luckily both people followed my advice and purchased Carbonite for their online backup solution.

Case #1: many pictures were taken, edited and then selected to print thumbnails of. One of the pictures wasn't any good and was deleted. Unfortunately, all the pictures were still selected and all were deleted. None were in the recycle bin and several hours of picture taking and editing would have been lost. Fortunately my client was using Carbonite and within a minute they were able to log into their account, search for the files just by using the first part of the file's name, select the files and click restore. Viola! Everything was back.
If this person was using a scheduled backup to an external hard drive it's unlikely that these would have been backed up since most people do backups once a week or once a day for the more conscientious. The benefit of backing up online is that CrashPlan and Carbonite back up your files silently and continuously in the background. You never know it's doing it. This provides huge peace of mind.

Case #2: this was your worst case scenario - there was a power outage and the hard drive got totally fried and all data was lost. There was no external drive backing up the data. Again my client was using Carbonite and all that was required was to buy a new hard drive, reload Windows and a few programs, log into Carbonite and download the Carbonite software. When the software was downloaded through their account it automatically knew to restore all the files that were backed up. It worked perfectly and within a couple hours they went from a dead computer to back up and running.

Ideally the last case should have also have also been doing a local backup with an "image" of their hard drive. This would have made restoration that much easier since it would have restored the entire drive without having to do all the re-installations of programs. Image backups take a long time, but they only need to be done once a month or so and then the online backup program can take care of updating all the data that was continuously being backed up.

After dealing with these two cases I now firmly believe that if you only decide to back up your information one way that the way to do it is Online. It's just so much easier and up to date than doing a backup to an external drive. Offsite. Continuous. Automatic. That's the way to go.

As an added bonus both CrashPlan and Carbonite allow you to access all your backed up data through any web browser, tablet or smartphone (CrashPlan is better for their device support). This gives you the added benefit of online backup AND cloud storage, not to mention total peace of mind.