Another hurdle facing the adoption of online backup has been a misconception that the amount of data far exceeds the capacity of the user's Internet connection. Most people just find it hard to believe that all the data on their personal machine, much less their server, could be conveniently ported to an online backup site. Here again, the advances in the client software offered by most onlie backup solutions provides the advantage.

Block-Level Backup

Block-Level backups are the solution to the speed/capacity issue. Instead of treating a 100 page thesis as a single document, the online backup client treats that single document as a series of blocks, with a size depending on the backup software used. If the 100 page document is broken up into 20 logical blocks, when the user makes changes, only the blocks with changes actually need to be backed up. After the initial backup, this dramatically reduces the amount of data transmitted to the Internet during a backup session. If the document is 5mb, perhaps only 64k of the file needs to be updated and backed up to the server.

Seed Loads

Though block-level backup eliminates the need for massive data exchange during the backup, there is still the initial backup to consider. This is a point where your selection of an online backup provider is important, especially if you have large amounts of data. Some backup providers offer a service called a seed load.

Say you are backing up 100GB of information. Using a moderate Internet connection, you can expect it to churn away for a week or more getting the initial backup completed. A provider that offers a seed load service will either send you a removable hard drive, or accept a removable hard drive to 'seed' your backup account. In a nutshell, that means the user uses the backup client to backup their system, not to the server, but directly to the hard drive, which takes a fraction of the time. The hard drive is then shipped to the provider, who loads it into their server. From there, the client software takes over and backs up only the files that have been changed since the initial seed load.

Another upshot of having this service available is during the inevitable restore process. When your system crashes, what business is willing to wait two weeks for all their data to cross the wires? Seed loads can work both ways, as an initial speed-backup, or a speed-restore.

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