Personal or Business Online Backup?

I have covered the topic of how to choose an online backup service extensively in an article on Cloudbackuping.com. Feel free to read it. Certainly you are going to find helpful information. That’s why I won’t go into detail here. However, I want to cover a topic that I couldn’t cover in that article. The difference between personal and business backup.
Personal plans are for home users and private use. So mainly it comes into play for personal data such as videos, photos, and documents. Business backup is generally more flexible meaning that it can be used both for personal and for business data. Without exception personal plans are cheaper than business plans. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a look at the business plans as well if you plan to back up your data for personal use.

Let’s look at some factors how personal and business online backup differ from each other:

Technical support

When choosing business online backup you are almost guaranteed to have a personal technical support assistance who you can call or e-mail for account specific issues. While for personal online backup plans one customer support agent has to cover hundreds of customers, for business online backup you have your own dedicated support agent. The absolute minimum for business accounts is a 24/7 helpline.

Pricing

Pricing for personal accounts start as low as $3 per month and no more then around $30 per month. However, business accounts can easily cost over thousand dollars per month depending on the account configuration. While that sounds like a lot of money, it actually isn’t when you consider what could be at stake when the business loses its customer data. But there are obviously cheaper business plans available especially for small businesses. But in my experience a personal account shall be enough even for small to medium businesses.

Storage space

Business accounts usually come with unlimited storage space or with special features such as faster upload speed without bandwidth throttling after a certain amount of data. Imagine you have 50 employees who all have to backup their files and after 200 GB a bandwidth throttle kicks in. Backups would take 10 to a 50 times more causing the business to lose time and therefore money. For personal use bandwidth throttling it is not a problem. You just wait longer until all your data is backed up. In fact, you hardly find bandwidth throttling anymore because storage space has become so cheap.

Features

Business plans have features especially tailored to their needs. For example multi-account creation that allow teams to access files simultaneously and edit them in real-time. Often times backups can be performed faster with business accounts. But in general the limiting factor is your own upload speed.

While personal accounts usually have one level of security business accounts can have customized security features that are especially important to their needs.

All in all, it all comes down to your needs. If you own a small or medium business you should definitely consider business online backup and compare the plans with the personal plans. Big business plans might offer you features that you would otherwise miss with personal accounts. You have to weigh carefully your requirements and then decide on an online backup service.