How long will an online backup take?
Our backup system doesn’t take complete backups every time. Instead it relies on incremental backup technology: only the difference is backed up every time it runs. Offices with high-speed internet connections should find this service comparable with tape drives. Dial up users will be able to do incremental backups in thirty to sixty minutes. However, the initial backup can take several nights to complete. We recommend backing up the most important files first and then selecting other files as the backup progresses. Or, the initial backup can be run over the weekend.
Users with high-speed broadband internet connections should find this service comparable or faster than tape drives. Even dial up users will be able to do incremental backups in thirty to sixty minutes. But because the backup happens automatically at night, you don’t need to pay someone to sit and watch it / swap CD’s.
The initial backup always takes the longest, and can vary from minutes to hours to days, depending on the volume of data being backed up. However, after the first full backup, our server compares its file store with the files on your computer and backs up only those files that have been modified since the last backup, which minimizes bandwidth overhead and can take as little as 2 minutes. Transfer speeds of course depend on the speed of your internet connection, but we can accommodate speeds ranging from old fashioned dialup all the way up to corporate LAN connections.
