Frequently Asked Questions

Absolutely not. Data is stored using 448-bit Blowfish encryption to encode the data. This is considerably greater than the encryption used for Internet banking and online credit card transactions.

No one else can see the data apart from the holder of the encryption key.

You should choose the package that best represents the amount of data you want to backup.

Most local backup systems are dependant on some form of manual input which requires time and effort. This is sometimes subject to neglect and doesn't work during holidays or sickness.

Consider running both systems side by side. This would give you added protection if your local backup fails.

We offer a completely free of charge 26 day trial of the Your-Data Internet Backup product. If after your 26 days are up you are not convinced, you are under no obligations to buy it!

You can sign up for your free trial right away by clicking here.

You can subscribe online using this website. Click here for our online ordering.

Your credit card details are completely safe. When you order, your details are processed in a secure manner by our payment processing gateway.

We are committed to ensuring your complete privacy. You can read our privacy policy by clicking here.

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. We suggest that you backup your files as frequently as required so that if you had to restore your data, only the least amount of work as possible is at risk. For most people, backing up changed files every night is enough.

IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU RETAIN A COPY OF THE PASSWORD AND ENCRYPTION KEY YOU CREATE AS THIS WILL BE YOUR ONLY WAY TO ACCESS DATA. LOSS OF THE PASSWORD OR KEY WILL PREVENT YOU ACCESSING YOUR INFORMATION. WE DO NOT KEEP A COPY OF YOUR SECURITY DETAILS.

KEEP YOUR SECURITY DETAILS SAFE.

You can purchase Your-Data Internet Backup today using the most popular credit and debit cards. The first payment must be made by credit or debit card, but subsequent automated payments can be paid by credit card, debit card or by Direct Debit.

Your-Data will be available 24x7x365 and you will therefore be able to access your information throughout this time frame.

The Your-Data support desk is available during a “Business Day” which is any day within the year, excluding weekends (Saturday, Sunday) and bank holidays.

The contracts are for a minimum of 1 year in length for the desktop and laptop product.

If you decide to terminate your contract your account will be deleted on an agreed date but not longer than 30 days after termination. Once the account has been deleted all of your data will be deleted within 24 hours.

We are able to monitor the account size you have. You will be unable to backup data beyond this threshold. If you run out you will have to contact us to upgrade your account.

See the pricing page for details and costs of other packages within the Your-Data Internet Backup service.

The mark of a true service offering is the ability to start small, with minimal capital investment, and scale seamlessly on demand without the need to replace systems or re-define the service architecture continually.

The modular design of the Your-Data Internet Backup service allows transparent scaling from a single device offering data protection a single user, to a global network providing continuous online backup for thousands of devices across multiple continents.

Capacity on demand forms the economic kernel of a true service architecture and few, if any, competitors are able to offer this for distributed, multi-platform devices ranging from corporate messaging servers through to individual computers and mobile laptops.

You will be able to access all versions of every single file you have created during the previous 60 days. In addition to this, after each month you will get a rolled up end of month copy which will be held on tape for the duration of the contract.

Your-Data is backed up over the Internet or secure network to a storage platform hosted in a highly available, secure data centre.

There will be a local copy of your backed up files held in the cache of the backed up computers. Also a further copy on the Your-Data Internet Backup platform, a replicated copy of the Your-Data Internet Backup platform at another remote site and this replicated copy is also backed up on to tape making a total of 4 copies.

If you need to change your password or encryption key, select either the Change Password or Change Encryption Key buttons from the application that is also supplied by Your-Data.

Changing your encryption key involves intensive processing on our servers and may take several minutes. It should therefore not be done unless your encryption key was compromised.

The amount of time required to backup files is very much dependant on your Internet connection, how much data, and what type of data you want to send to our servers. We recommend that after your initial backup, which may be quite large, you only backup changed files which results in a much smaller backup.

You can limit the total amount of data that may be transferred during each backup. Please note that if you enable this option, it may take several backups before all your files are backed up to the Storage Platform. This feature is especially useful if you have a poor Internet connection and you encounter problems with transferring large backups. See user manual.

The Backup Client uses a fair portion of the available processor power to patch, compress and encrypt files during the backup process. If you use the computer at the same time, you may experience some performance deterioration. You can lessen this effect by lowering the Processor Usage.

You can backup any file on your system.

We advise that you should backup all critical data files. These are files that you have created such as Word documents, system settings, accounts and databases etc.

Whilst possible, there is no real value in backing up your application files as it is quicker and easier to re-install these programs rather than restore them.

Yes you can.

For additional information regarding Your-Data Internet Backup for your server(s), you can click here.

Yes. If your computer is turned off, so is the software for doing the backups.

After each time you backup your files, the client application screen will display the status of the last backup. Historic information is also visible from the client.

First your computer compresses and encrypts your data. The Backup Client then securely transfers this data to our servers for safe keeping.

Using a regular broadband Internet connection, it takes approximately 10 hours to transfer 1 GB of data. To transfer 20 GBytes, it would take approximately 8 days. Over a 30 day period, you would require 600 Gbytes on our servers to store all of the files.

Do you really need to send 20 Gbytes every day? We find that most of our clients send fewer than 100 MBytes which is far quicker.

Only files that have been modified or added since the last backup will be identified for backup by the system. Changes to a file are extracted at the binary level.

For example if a Word document is edited only the changed bytes of that document will be extracted and sent through to the Your-Data platform. Your-Data Internet Backup is able to update files using the daily incrementals. This means every recovery is a full, updated file.

To restore your files using the Your-Data Internet Backup service it is as simple as 1, 2, 3 . . .

First: select the backup set you wish to restore

Second: identify the files you require

Third: decide whether to restore the files to their original or a new location

The time required to restore your files is dependant on how much information you are trying to restore and the speed of your Internet connection. For example, it will take approximately 35 minutes to restore 100 MBytes using a typical broadband Internet connection.

When restoring your files, you can choose from everything you have on our servers or just a single file.

You can do as many restores as you want or need. To prove the service we recommend that you carry out test restores and this should form part of your ongoing disaster recovery strategy.

If you lose all the data on your computer then first you will have to rebuild your Operating System and applications. Once you have completed this task you can then reinstall your backup client and data.

You will be taken through the exact steps as if you were installing the client for the first time, but when you are prompted to set up the account you select connect to an existing backup account.

Once you have connected to the account you will have total visibility of all your previous backups and will be able to restore all necessary files.

We also offer a data recovery option for those time sensitive disasters, where we will send you a copy of your data on DVD or removable hard drive for direct recovery.

Note: you will still need to build your Operating System and applications before loading your files.

Your encryption key is seen as a pass phrase by our systems. A random encryption key is automatically generated when any account is created and this random key (and not the pass phrase specified by you) is used to encrypt your files.

The encryption key is protected by the pass phrase and without this pass phrase you cannot decode the actual encrypted data. When you change the encryption key in the software, the key is decrypted and re-encrypted with the new pass phrase. The data is never touched.

Because all data that is transferred and stored on our servers is encrypted, there is no way for a virus to infect your data. Any file that you transfer containing a virus will still contain the virus when you restore the data.

The software works best with at least 256 MBytes of system memory.

Your-Data Internet Backup uses standard TCP ports to make secure connections to the Storage Platform. If you have already allowed HTTPS (port 443) out of your firewall then there is no need to make any changes.

The communication is deemed to be from internal to external communication, therefore not opening up any outside communications to your internal systems.

Our Desktop and Laptop software currently works on all 32-bit versions of Windows, including 98, ME, XP, NT, 2000 and 2003.

For additional information regarding Your-Data Internet Backup for your server(s), you can click here.

You will need access to a dial-up or be a subscriber to a broadband service providing bandwidth of at least a minimum of 128k for day to day backups. However, please note that your first backup of your data may take some time at this connection speed.

In these circumstances you may want to take advantage of Your-Data’s onsite installation service where a backup engineer will come to your site and take the first backup away to be uploaded to the Datacentre. From there, any changes will automatically be sent from your systems to the Datacentre.