What contingency plans do online backup services have in case their servers crash or are destroyed?

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June 17th, 2010 - Posted by Kent

The following is an actual user-submitted question:

Q: What contingency plans do online backup services have in case their servers crash or are destroyed?

A: For an answer to this question, we looked at a blog post written on Carbonite's blog:

Carbonite uses RAID-6 redundant arrays which spread copies of the data across multiple hard drives. Each array has 16 drives. Three of the 16 would have to fail simultaneously and the user’s PC would have to crash at the same time before any data would be lost. These RAID-6 arrays are 36,000,000 times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. We have redundant power, redundant Internet connections, redundant Web servers and so forth. The data center is guarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and admission is controlled by fingerprint ID locks.

The blog post further describes the data center as "bomb proof." So, short of a meteorite smashing into Carbonite's data center (at the very moment when your hard drive fails), you're pretty safe. Of course, meteorites and coincidences  do happen, which is probably why backup provider, SugarSync backs up your data at "two geo-redundant, carrier-grade data centers." That way, if something should happen to one data center, your data is also backed up at another. Really this is probably the safest option, though the chances of such a catastrophic failure are incredibly slim.

In short, we think you're safe with any of our picks for online backup services.