Up until only a few decades ago, every single piece of information that we had was stored on paper, including books, official documents, and even memories in the form of pictures. While this did allow people to constantly touch and feel those objects, there were terrible inconveniences to them: physical things simply tend to get lost and/or damaged. As such, thousands, if not millions of pages of texts were lost over the years, only because of library fires. Fortunately, our society has recently been more or less computerized, with nearly everyone always having some computer-like device with them, whether it's a desktop at home or a smartphone in their pocket. This digital age has given birth to the possibility of online backup, and boy can it make a difference in your life.


The best way to describe what an online backup is would be to compare with the storage section of a bank. When it comes to the latter, it works by simply having you deposit your precious belongings in a safe box, to be kept secure behind the bank's mighty vault doors. The problem with that is that you cannot access your belonging any time you wish to. This means that only the most important documents and the most precious of objects were kept there; things like regular files, photographs and such never made it in. An online backup is basically the same thing, with the only difference being that you will always be able to access your files, as long as you have an internet connection. In addition, you won't even need to part with the original files as the backup will consist of identical copies. Finding an online backup service is far from being hard, especially if you look for the term "cloud storage"; it seems most people prefer to call it that way.


In any case, what real advantages are there to making use of an online backup service? Well, imagine yourself that you are coming home one day, only to be cut off by three fire trucks. As you go on, you get a terrible feeling inside your stomach as the fire trucks seem to be headed in the same way you are. Upon arriving home, you see it being scorched by the flames, with years upon years of memories stored in albums, tapes, cd backups, and memory sticks, all up in smoke. In such a situation, not only would you lose what remained of the moments which made your life the way it is (of course, this doesn't take into account your memory, but even that degenerates and gets fuzzy over time). However, if you have an online backup, all your data is going to be stored on an external server, and regardless of what happens to the original data, this one will always exist and be readily accessible.


In the end, an online backup is far more reliable than traditional methods of data storage, mostly because it becomes impervious to physical destruction, unless of course the actual server where the information is stores gets destroyed. However, these servers are generally maintained in high-security, hazard-free areas, meaning the chances of something happening to them are slim to none… as a matter of fact, there is a good chance that the information you are going to store online will end up outliving you. If you haven't done so already, you should really take the time to make an online backup of your information; after all, there are some things that you can never get back once you have lost them.