Online backup is a great idea — your data is stored offsite, most services let you set up automatic, unattended backups. And you can restore data from any computer connected to the Internet.
You do have to trust the company you're dealing with, though, and many of the companies offering online backup services for small businesses are little-known start-ups. But now a trusted name in computer security, Symantec Corp., maker of the Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security products, offers a backup service of its own.
Symantec Online Backup, priced as low as $10 a month for 10 gigabytes (GB) of storage, is the first of a planned suite of online services built on the company's Symantec Network Protection platform. Symantec designed the service for small and medium-size businesses and made it simple enough to configure and use that even non-technical personnel can manage it.
You can back up as many computers as you want and pay a fixed amount per month for a given amount of data — 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500 or 1,000-plus GB — plus a certain amount per gigabyte for "overage" if your backups take more than the contracted amount of space.
We tested the sign-up, configuration, backup and recovery processes and came away impressed — although with a few reservations.
Simplicity
The sign-up process is a matter of filling out an online form with basic information about your company: name, address, telephone number. Symantec currently offers a one-month no-obligation trial, but you do have to enter credit card data.
The company calls Online Backup a Web-based application. This is a key differentiator as it means you can perform administrative functions from any Internet-connected computer. To configure backups or restores or view reports, you open a browser, surf to the service's portal site and key in a username and password.
Most services require you to install a large piece of software to perform these functions. With Symantec Online Backup, you do have to download and install agent software, which works in the background to manage backups and restores, but it's a relatively small download.
When you add the first computer to your account and download and install the agent software, you also have to input an encryption passphrase — a password that determines how Online Backup will encrypt your data. The agent encrypts the files before they leave your system, which means nobody can intercept and read your data as it passes over the Internet.
It's vital that you don't lose the passphrase because you need it to restore data onto a new system. Symantec does not keep the passphrase or have access to it. This may not sound like such a good thing, but it is. If hackers break in to the Symantec systems, your data will be unreadable. And even if government or law enforcement gets a court order obliging Symantec to give them access to your files, they won't be able to read anything.
But fear not. The price for Online Backup includes a free subscription to an online escrow service, a secure Web site where you store your encryption passphrase and can always recover it if you forget it.
After installing the agent, rebooting your computer and "confirming" the computer by following a link from an automatically sent e-mail, you're ready to log in and configure a backup.
