A. AES stands for “Advanced Encryption Standard” and can be used to safeguard your backup data from point of creation to point of recovery. In its most basic form, encryption takes your data and masks it with a private key so that it cannot be tampered with. Whilst encrypted, your data is functionally useless to anyone without the means to decrypt it and is therefore much safer. The 256-bit portion of the encryption refers to the key length that is used to encrypt the file(s) and typically, the longer the key, the more secure it is. In it’s current form, 256-bit is the longest key length available in AES encryption.