There are quite a few companies that offer backup solutions in the cloud, which is good for if you want to be sure that your data is backed up in multiple locations, but they have one big disadvantage and that is that it takes ages for the first backup to run, if you have a large amount of data. Some companies give you the option to send them a hard disk with the data on it, but they seem to charge quite a lot for this service. If you ever have to restore all of the data, then you will come across the final big problem, which is how long it will take to restore the data over the internet. While if you have the data on your own drive at a secure location, then the time for recovery is just how long it takes to get the backup device back to the office, plus the time it takes to copy the data over a hopefully gigabit network.
Some time ago a client asked me about the offsite backup options available, so I had a look at the various options with their advantages and disadvantages and explained them to the client. They decided to go with my custom solution and I think this was because of only having to pay a one off fee for the hardware and the fact that they can just drive the data back in a car, if a disaster did strike with the server at the office. Some years later another client had a problem where a virus had infected two of the office machines and had encrypted the data on the desktop of them, it then also started to encrypt the data on their NAS drive, but it only managed to work its way through 4 of the directories. There was a local backup attached to the NAS, so the data was restored and a disaster was averted. The client then asked me about the other backup options that were available and when I mentioned that another NAS could act as a backup server from their house, they immediately went with that option and bought the hardware.
The backup script used on the NAS was also upgraded to provide snapshots of the data, which would allow older versions of the files to be available. I had to write the initial remote backup system myself, because I could not find any backup scripts that could work when the remote machine is behind a firewall. In the end I had to come up with a remote command system where the server would tell the remote machine that it is ready for it to pull the backup, so that it would not happen until the local backup had finished. The backup script on the NAS is now a combination of my initial backup script and another snapshot backup script that I did find. If you are interested in this kind of a remote backup system, then get in touch with me to see what can be arranged.