Online Backup - How to choose the right supplier - part 4

Following on from part 3, it is important to understand how your potential providers charge you for storage although fundamentally you'll want to know how much it will cost to backup X amount of data.

As this point can be confusing, we'll give another example here.

Supposing your hard disk is 80 GB and you want to back up 2 GB of critical data (no point in just backing up the whole hard disk unless it is all critical information). Using a supplier who charges for compressed storage on their servers you'll want to know how much space 2GB of data will compress down to.

If the 2 GB of data is mainly office files and spreadsheets, etc then you are likely to receive a high compression ratio - say 4 to 1. This means your data will compress down to 500MB - the amount of data this type of provider will charge you. If you want to be more cautious, assume a compression ratio of 3 to 1 which means you 'll be charged for around 660 MB of space.

beginning to get the picture?

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