By Joe Venturelli
When you think of your connection to the Internet you probably don’t think about its capacity or what the breaking point of that connection is. What you probably don’t realize is that like the grid that carries electricity to your home, at some point demand will eventually exceed supply.
What does that mean?
Well historically the use of Internet bandwidth, especially from a home consumer standpoint is fairly predictable. Most Internet service providers (ISPs) will tell you that from the hours of 6pm to midnight is the highest utilization of Internet bandwidth because folks come home from work and they eat supper and then they are watching a movie on the web, or emailing, updating Facebook etc. and all that usage between those hours creates a demand that most Internet providers cannot supply.
This explains why — although you may have 15Mb of speed to your home at 8pm — you can’t watch a movie off of Netflix that isn’t choppy, blurry and downright unwatchable.
When the demand for electricity becomes too great we will experience brown-outs or rolling blackouts. When demand on Internet bandwidth becomes too great we experience “Bandwidth Throttling” which basically means that everyone loses a little speed, so maybe everyone’s connection runs 20% slower.
Which usually wouldn’t be a problem but if you aren’t paying for the premium circuit every month and you just have the basic service, 20% can be a lot especially if you are trying to watch a movie or download information.
When the software was designed that NitroBackup uses to copy your data to the cloud, Bandwidth throttling was taken into consideration, meaning that while you are at work during the day or while you are sleeping the NitroBackup software takes advantage of the low bandwidth demands on the network and pushes out your data to be backed up at the highest rate possible.
In fact the software works at maximum efficiency when you aren’t using the computer and takes advantage of the unused computer and the unused network at the same time. When you come home and start using the computer, NitroBackup takes a back seat to the work you are doing and will backup data more slowly so as to not impede your work.
Many customers will sign up with our service one evening after work and then watch the data move to the cloud and be concerned that the data is not being backed up quickly enough. Then they go to bed and wake up and notice lots of activity occurred while they slept.
Keep in mind that when you choose to use NitroBackup to protect your digital life, of course you want to get all your data backed up, but once it’s backed up, what’s most important is how quickly we can get it back once a problem occurs with your computer or your hard drive.
Our specially designed Restore client makes bringing the files back from the cloud a snap. You can read more about Restoring Files here.
