Best online backup services for business in 2017

[The Ga[M]er.]

Introduction

Note: Our best online backup services for business round-up has been fully updated. This feature was first published in November 2013.

If running regular backups is important for home users, it's essential in business: losing even a small fraction of your most important data, for a brief period of time, could still be a real disaster.

You could try to protect yourself by copying files to local drives, but that takes time and effort. It also leaves you vulnerable to fire, theft and hardware failure, which is why automatically uploading your files to a cloud backup service is often a better idea.

Choosing the right backup solution can seem tricky, as there's a lot to consider. How much storage space do you really need, for instance? Must the service support versioning (where multiple versions of documents are kept)? How should this be managed?

Security is important, too. What sort of encryption options do you get? How is access to your data managed? What options are there for managing your users, seeing what they're doing, making sure they're complying with your policies and procedures?

You're probably not going to get by with a free Dropbox account, but there are plenty of business providers ready to deliver the extras you and your company need. Here, in alphabetical order, are eight of the best.