Why should you use online data backup?  This is something we feel very passionately about here at Symagio.  For most organizations, the standard backup solution is to either use an external hard drive or tape drives.  For a long time, this was the best the market could offer.  Progress, however, is a great thing - and the solutions that Symagio offers are on the cutting edge.
Tape drives simply are not reliable.  That’s a fact - they’ve been shown to fail with much more frequency that any disk drives.  Tapes need to be constantly handled, stored, and retrieved.  With so much human intervention necessary, the chances of human error throw any reliability out the window.  Factor in the rate of deterioration of tapes and you can begin to see why at Symagio we’re so adamant about disk-to-disk protection.
What many businesses don’t realize, however, is that backing up data via tape drives is actually a very expensive proposition.  The costs often remain hidden throughout the backup process, so many businesses don’t adequately analyze the total cost.  Let’s look at some of the hidden costs: 
Labor and Productivity:  Say you need to restore a single file that an employee accidentally deleted.  You’ve backed it up on your tape drive, but those are now in off-site storage.  The productivity you lose in recalling the appropriate tape is substantial; the recovery period for even a single file is simply too long.  You’re paying your IT personnel a substantial salary for every hour they spend searching through boxes of tapes for that single file.
Furthermore, a tape drive backup method requires substantial oversight and intervention from your IT department.  Rotating tapes, ensuring each backup was successful, and then moving the tapes to an off-site location: your IT department is inundated with backup duties for which you pay them quite well.  Why not allow them to focus on more productive (instead of reactive) tasks, such as leveraging technology to make your business more profitable? 
Tape Drives and Tapes:  Let’s face it: tape drives aren’t cheap.  What’s more, they’re in constant need of inspection, repair and replacement.  The need to constantly buy new tapes and new heads for the tape drives can add substantial costs and headaches for any business.
General tape maintenance, both onsite and offsite, is extremely important and often times costly: an old, corrupted tape won’t do you any good when you need to restore your critical data. 
Software Costs:  The software used for any tape library isn’t cheap, and you have to constantly worry about upgrades and compatibility issues.  Is every computer in your network covered by a separate license, and will the software still be compatible when you upgrade your system?  These can be costly concerns.
Storage Costs:  If you keep your tapes offsite, you must pay to not only transport them offsite, but also to store them.  With exponential data growth, your tape library will consistently grow as well.  This means greater complexity for restoring a simple file and subsequently greater costs of storage and retrieval. 
What’s the moral of this story?  Our online data backup solution not only reduces your risk and addresses the many points of failure associated with tape backups, but also eliminates these hidden costs.  Factor in the reduction in personnel, hardware, software, and storage costs, and Symagio’s solution is extremely cost effective.