Cloud Backup vs Cloud Storage: Is There Any Change?

The terms “Cloud storage” and “Cloud backup” continue to puzzle many users while they are choosing a service. Both of these services do have some important differences. Cloud backup or online backup services has been for quite some time, earlier the Cloud storage, also called Online storage came into existence. The Cloud storage can be seen as an addition of the Cloud backup only as along with backing up data the Cloud storage does offer some extra features such as access and collaborative sharing.

What do you mean by Cloud Backup?

Based on the Cloud computing – one of the most innovative technologies – Cloud backup is a service that secures your business serious data and business continuity by performing automatic archiving of your data, servers, applications, and virtual machines on a regular interval to store them securely for recovery if a disaster raids.

Cloud backup is actually like a virtual off-site account through which user can have access to their stored digital copy of their physical devices, for example – PCs, smartphones, tablets, phablets from around the world at any point of time. The Cloud backup functionality includes several steps like collecting the data to be backed up, compressing the data, encrypting then finally moved to the Cloud backup service. It is performed incrementally after an initial full back up so as to decrease the amount of bandwidth consumption. The process also declines the time to be spent in moving data.

Having Cloud backup you are certain that you have multiple copies of your business-critical data on multiple media from you can recover it on an event of hard drives crack or mislaid.

What is Cloud Storage?

As we have previously discussed above that Cloud storage or Online storage is nothing but a comprehensive version of Cloud backup or Online backup. It propositions some additional features with easy file sharing from any device and from anyplace being the most attractive.

Cloud storage is a space where you can store your files, access them, modify, share, and can transfer files online. It allows you to have collaborative sharing enabling multiple employees to work on the same file concurrently without having versioning issues. This feature of Cloud storage superbly improved the efficiency level of employees. They can work from home or on the go.

Users can sync a portion of their hard drives with the cloud storage and do changes on their hard drives so as to duplicate to the cloud storage.

The Main Differences

Mentioned below are some salient differences between the Cloud backup and Cloud storage:

File Transfer: Cloud backup services offer an improved security by using encryption method. But it doesn’t offer file sharing feature between the users.

Cloud storage services, on the other hand, allow users to share their files stored in the cloud across a number of users through collaborative sharing method.

Safety against Data Loss: The Cloud backup creates redundant files so that the version of data that gets lost can be recovered. While in cloud storage services, files are synced across multiple devices and no redundant files are created in case a version is lost in any of the devices.

The Final Conclusion

Prior to subscribing either of the cloud services, it is of utmost importance to know your business needs. A Cloud storage service may not be sufficient enough for providing full backup solutions as it doesn’t support redundancy.