Some companies are offering an Internet backup service, at a cost competitive with backing up on tape or cartridge. Two such companies are SafeGuard Interactive Inc. and Connected Corp. . They permit hard disk backup via a standard Internet connection you must have a previous account with an Internet provider. Their pricing strategy makes it affordable. But it generally takes about 10 hours to perform an initial backup of a gigabyte of data, according to one company spokesman.
Subsequent backups are much faster because the system transmits only the files that have changed.
The service uses another interesting trick to save time and storage costs. When you transmit a program file such as Microsoft Word it checks to see if there is an identical file anywhere on SafeGuard s machines. If so, it just uploads a token, which tells the system that you have that file. There is no reason to upload it again, because it s already stored. By default, you can restore the data only to the machine that was used to transmit it in the first place.