Cautionary Tale: Reliability is Key to Online Data Storage

Got stress? You might if your online backup service proves to be unreliable and your data becomes inaccessible.

MyOtherDrive.com recently experienced an unplanned outage due to a widespread power outage in the Ohio-Kentucky region of the United States. The outage lasted longer than the battery backup system for the company's servers, resulting in a day long outage and frustration for users. Thankfully, there was no data loss.

To their credit, the company took the following actions:

• Notified users with an honest, detailed email explaining the situation.
• Acted quickly to take advantage of the down time by moving their data center during the outage instead of later in the month, as originally intended.
• Created a more robust environment for their data center.

This outage illustrates one of the negative qualities of online data storage:

The user loses control of their backup data environment.

Keep this risk in mind when choosing an online backup service.

Companies like JungleDisk.com encrypt and store user data on multiple Amazon.com datacenters, which offers more stability and less downtime for its customers.