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As name suggests, this service facilitates users for backing up their computer files online. Usually managed backup services provide backing up services. Nowadays, any medium to large scale organization would have a remote backup service as millions of gigabytes are added to the databases and file servers of these companies daily. In this brief discussion we are trying to identify the features of online backup services.

One of the important features of online backups is called opened file backup. This has the ability of backing up extensively opened files such as mail and database files with the minimum loss of data in case of an emergency. When this method is practiced, system administrators don’t have to have a dedicated time for system maintenance. The other feature of a good online backup survive is the ability to backup multi-platform or cross platform computer files. This means the same backup system should be able to backup files from Windows, Linux, Mackintosh and other enterprise level operating systems.

Continuous backup systems are widely used for backing up business sensitive data by the organization who cannot absolutely afford data losses. By this method, the files that are being backed up are continuously copied and saved to another secured location every time they are saved in the original location. Usually this method requires high resource availability as there is a background process executed always. When it comes to the factors which decide the cost of online backup, storage and network bandwidth plays a vital role. For this, there are few implementations. Data compression is one method used for reducing the storage and bandwidth. Usually, the data to be backed up will be extracted by the backup software and then compresses before transferring to the remote location. To further reduce the bandwidth usage and storage, there is an alternative called Differential Data Compression which will transfer only the binary data which has been changed from one day to another. This is a very cost effective solution especially when you spend a lot for bandwidth usage.