Online Backup

In a time when many are deciding whether venturing into the cloud, here we give you 5 reasons why, the external hard-drive should not be your choice for storage and security.

Security breeches
1. External hard drives generally weaken your security in the long run. It’s far easier to steal external hard drives than stealing desktop computers or laptops. Plus, very few people go through the hassle of encrypting their external hard drives, making them to access.

Set for failure
2. External hard drives will and do, eventually fail. If you plan to use external hard drives to store data so you can access it at home, work, and school? External hard drives all eventually fail and few of them are ever adequately backed up. There are solutions however like a data recovery cable, these can restore data from a failed hard drive if need be.

Needs power
3. External hard drives often require extra plugs to connect to an electrical socket, much like anything else connected to your laptop or desktop. Although not a big deal at home- it can be annoying. Have you ever been in conference where everyone is fighting over all the power sockets? If you come to depend on external hard drives, all of it could be useless without that extra plug.

Old computers are out
4. Many new and existing external hard drives are just not compatible with older computers. Particularly any hard drives that require eSATA connections—a connection that is only a few years old. But even external hard drives that require USB 2.0 might workfar too slow on older computers that only support original version USB 1.0.

Battery hog
5. External hard drives that don’t require any extra plugs will instead drain all laptop batteries. These “low-power” hard drives all draw about 1.5 volts on a constant stream from your laptop’s USB port—that is as much as 20% of the total battery output in some laptops, cutting around an hour off of your battery life depending on the make and model.

Cris G

In this day and age, many companies have now misplaced confidence in their current ability to prevent data loss and a lot are not as secure as they seem.

According to top security software provider Websense, 81% of companies are “confident” in security that they currently have, despite once again a high rate of lost data.

It also revealed that the majority of lost data is vastly accidental, including posting on social media sites, downloading large private files onto unsecured mobile devices and transferring documents to thumb drives, which are then misplaced.

“Part of this confidence can be blamed to vendors. If you think about all of the myriad of smaller vendors that have one or two point solutions … it might be part of a vendor issue (where they say) ‘yeah, we’ve got that covered, we’ve got that covered,’ which leads to this overconfidence,” said Fiaaz Walji, Canadian country manager for Websense.

Mr Walji continued to say that users need to move away limiting the use of certain mobile devices and websites, and start to concentrate on what information would be most damaging if lost or leaked.

The US based online storage company Carbonite, has recently relocated its whole customer service operation, from India back to Lewiston, US, bringing with it an estimated 150 new jobs to Maine.

“Carbonite’s decision to base its customer support operations in Lewiston is further proof that Maine is open for business and that our continuous efforts to make Maine a more business friendly state is clearly paying off,” Said Carbonite CEO David Friend.

David had promised almost a year ago to bring all customer service based jobs back to the U.S. He also said Maine’s lack of bureaucracy in the complicated permitting process, was a main factor in relocating to the Maine area.

The 150 jobs in question are mainly customer based and include technical-support jobs the company announced earlier this year before the switch was to go ahead.

Carbonite was founded in 2005 and has since then grown on to more than 250 employees across multiple cities, with more than $38 million in revenue last year.

Chris G