A couple of years ago, when a business acquaintance first told me about his company's decision to switch from media-based data storage (tapes, CDs, zip drives) to utilizing the services of an online data backup company, the first thing that came to mind was a nightmare that had occurred in my business back in the mid- to late 80s. "Disaster" was definitely the word for it - and our protection against the fallout from it was practically non-existent.

Sometime after the end of business on a Friday, some pipes burst in the suite of offices right above ours. Throughout the weekend, untold gallons of water crashed through the ceiling unrestrained and uncontrolled, so that by Monday morning it looked as if a tidal wave had washed us. Unexpected, to say the least, on the 14th floor of a building in the middle of town.

As is the case with most executives it was my habit to be the early bird to the office, and the sight that greeted me when I unlocked the door is forever burned into my brain. Our carpet was soaked through with three to four inches of water. Our furniture was all but floating through our suites - and even the pieces that remained stationary were soaked through and ruined. All the phone lines were shorted out. And I didn't dare flip any light switches....

Worst of all, though, was what I saw when I went to inspect our small, fledgling IT area. Absolutely everything in the room was thoroughly drenched and dripping water, from our server to the file cabinets housing tape backups to the PCs on the desks. We had, just several months prior, begun the arduous task of moving our client and other business data from hard copies onto an electronic storage system - and I can still hear the one word that echoed in my head as I surveyed the damage: Gone.

Our insurance policy covered the financial losses - but nothing could reimburse us for or replace the staggering amount of vital data lost to the flood. Because this was in the 80s and IT departments were just beginning to be considered in small businesses, the learning curve was steep and expensive when anything out of the ordinary happened. Online data storage services didn't even exist in those days. Our entire repository of crucial data had been on those tapes and on that server - and we lost almost all of it.

The first lesson my company learned from our flood was that we needed physical, off-site storage for our organizational and customer data. That's how we handled backup and storage for many years following that event - but while that was a great deal safer than storing our data on-site, there was nothing to guarantee our storage site wouldn't ever experience such an unexpected disaster, as well.

I never once fully stopped worrying about it - until I learned about online data storage and backup services.

Today, my company utilizes both an on-site tape backup and the services of a remote, online backup system. Our in-house tapes are mostly used for monthly backups (thus saving wear and tear on the tapes and maintenance on the hardware) and we use an online data and storage service for daily data backups. We're fully covered, now - and our data is as safe as it possibly can be.