Small businesses in IT that want to implement or upgrade their data recovery systems should look to online backup services to be on the safe side, it has been recommended.

Michael Whitt, the manager of integrated systems at Mesa Associates, stated that keeping everything in-house only was a recipe for disaster, should one hit a company during the next few months.

He said of businesses which run no offsite data and make daily backups to the hard drive: "This is the least secure. If the computer fails, the backups are likely to be lost. The likelihood of being able to restore is remote."

It was noted that in corporate plans, fault tolerance and disaster recovery systems are topics frequently overlooked and under-described, leaving many businesses open to major problems.

This week, Jim Spooner told Techworld that people installing disaster recovery systems should invest a little more money into the testing of the product to ensure it works before relying on it.

A recent survey for Connect found that one in ten companies has lost important data as a result of a backup failure. The company has now developed a unique online backup service for SMEs to ensure they can survive any disaster.