What’s The Difference Between Online Backup and Online Storage?

What is the difference between online backup and online storage? That’s a very good question to ask. Although the two separate terms are used interchangeably, they are geared towards two very different purposes. So, how does online storage compare to online backup?

Online Backup and Online Storage: The Low Down

Let’s first deal with what online backup is, and what it does. Online backup is meant to nullify data loss, by creating backups of files that are stored locally on your computer. Like Time Machine, but in a cloud where if anything does crash, your files and their saves are all kept intact.

While local backup solutions such as Time Machine do work very well, if the entire laptop or desktop computer crashes, it becomes functionally useless, and effectively fails in preventing data loss. To summarize; online backup helps insure that there is never any data loss, by saving copies, new files and changes made to files, in a cloud.

Now let’s take a look at online storage. Online storage is basically taking your files and folders, and dumping their content onto a company’s servers. These files can be music, movies, pictures, texts files and even software.  They are left in a pristine state and no alterations are made to them, if you add a new file to your computer system or change something about in an old one, the copy stored in online storage is left untouched by these changes.

It’s basically like having an external hard drive, but in a cloud.

Conclusion

Another major difference between online backup and online storage is how they make use of your Internet connection. Online backup services remain constantly connected to you computer, keeping an eye files as they change and update, while online storage only requires a one time connection every time a file (or batch of files) needs to be uploaded.

It’s prudent to note that difference between online backup and online storage are practically void these days, as most companies offer both services in a single package. But now that you know the difference between online storage and online backup, you can choose a service which caters to your specific needs, and maybe even save yourself a few bucks in the process if you only need one out of the two services.

Make sure to secure your computer with the best online backup service possible to avoid disaster.