One of the great privileges that come with the freelancing lifestyle is the ability to travel whenever and wherever you want. One day you could be in Thailand, and the next you’re in Costa Rica.

And your customers don’t care where you are, because you do all of your work over the Internet. Life is good.

But with this privilege, also comes risk. Carrying a laptop makes you a prime target for theft. And, because laptops tend to get thrown around a lot, they also stand a greater risk of damage than a desktop PC would.

That’s why, in this article, we’ll give you some basic freelancer-specific advice for picking an online backup solution that will help protect the data on your laptop while you travel.

1. Look for point-in-time file recovery features

When most people think of online backup, they imagine simply sending their files away to some far-off server on the Internet. But there’s a bit more to online backup than just off-site file storage.

If you accidentally write over an important file or get a computer virus, you need a sort of “digital time machine” that will allow you to roll back to a previous version of your data. This way, you can recover your file from the way it was this morning, or yesterday, or even a week ago.

This is why it’s so important to pick a solution that maintains several file versions into the past.

2. Keep your “data loss window” to a minimum

Regardless of which method you choose for data protection, there will always be a small risk of data loss. The trick is to select a method that keeps that risk down to a bare minimum.

If you perform your backups every day after work, you potential window for data loss would be roughly 24 hours. If anything should go wrong at 4:30pm, you would lose an entire day’s worth of work. Not good!

One way to minimize this risk would be to select an online backup service that uploads your data continuously… every time you save a file. By doing this, you risk losing only a few minutes of work in the event that something bad should happen. This is much less painful than losing an entire day.

3. Pick a solution that protects you both online and offline

One of the biggest concerns that we hear from freelancers and traveling businesspeople is that they don’t always have convenient access to a reliable Internet connection. Although this might’ve been a problem 5 or 6 years ago, online backup has changed a lot in recent years to accommodate business travelers.

Today, there are solutions available which – in addition to storing your data online – will also create a local hard drive partition for your backups. This way, you can still backup and restore your data when you’re off-line.

And as soon as you connect, these systems will instantly synchronize with the backup server. It all happens in the background, without having to lift a finger. (Easy is good)

4. Pick a solution that can minimize your bandwidth usage

Internet connection speed is a major concern when it comes to backing up data for business travelers. That’s why you should look for a solution that offers “block-level” incremental file uploads. With block-level upload technology, the backup software will analyze all of your files to see what has changed since your last update, and it will only upload that portion of the file.

This technique is so effective that it can often reduce your bandwidth usage by up to 90%.

5. Pick a solution that’s easy to use

This is the most important feature. There’s no point in having a backup solution if you’re not going to use it.

Any service you select should be very intuitive and user-friendly, and they should offer fast, friendly support if you have any questions.

If you’re a freelancer who works from the road or abroad, these 5 features should be a good starting point in selecting an online backup provider that’s right for your needs.

Author Bio:

Storagepipe offers online backup and server backup software that’s designed for small businesses and freelancers.