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Mike Winiberg wrote: If the data is important to you, then multiple copies on local storage is the only way to be reasonably sure that when you need that info it will be available. And testing/refreshing the backups too!
That's even easier with cloud services. You add in one device, it syncs with all of them, naturally creating already multiple local copies. All you need to do is keep those devices connected and you will always have access to those files. If service gets shutdown, your local copy is already there.
Much better than relying on a manual error prone process of maintaining multiple local copies, which may all be gone if your house catches on fire. Plus, with a service like this you can even keep stuff locally but geographically distant (like the office, or some family member's house) without additional effort.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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I'm not saying it isn't useful, and by keeping local copies on the linked devices, then you do effectively get the best of both worlds (and incidentally you are then effectively keeping multiple local backups so your data is both secure and accessible).
However, there is always a single point of failure - and that is the internet connection. If that is off and you don't have local copies, then your data is inaccessible - and where I live the internet is slow and intermittent at best (so much so that I use my mobile to provide connectivity at times, but that isn't suitable for public facing servers). There are many millions of people all over the world (and plenty even in the UK) that do not have reliable access to the internet. Also, even Amazon and Google have major outages occasionally (two this year from memory, so far). Likewise, for other than small end-users, the costs of subscribing to cloud storage are not insignificant.
For individuals, this is not usually a big issue, but for 24/7 businesses that rely on fast network messaging or have high data rates to support (eg trading floors), even a few seconds interruption can cost far more than the base cost of providing local storage etc - ask the LSE about their Monday morning's outage a few years ago due to an untested upgrade roll-out!
There are some very sophisticated systems around these days (eg from EMC) that provide the advantages of cloud but without creating a dependence on being on-line 24/7. I retired recently and one local business I looked after then decided to migrate all their IT activity to the Cloud. On one day in August this year they were unable to sell tickets to their walk-in customers, deal with bookings or email, take card payments etc, all because the local internet backbone suffered an outage. This small business lost many thousands as a result.
So, my - overly verbose! - message. Be careful!
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Well, I wouldn't dare enter the domain of non personal backup in this thread. Scenarios are way too variable, much more complex (even Internet connection is different, via dedicated links) and usually employ multiple fallback mechanisms. When we talk about 24/7 availability and disaster recovery, we are talking way beyond backups and in many occasions Internet is necessary anyway, in which cases there are redundant Internet connectivity infrastructure in place.
Now, back to personal or even small business use, I am all for being safe and save places that Internet is really an issue, which today are concentrade on pockets of African countries, most of the time (I assume) you wouldn't a super reliable Internet. If you get mange to do the initial setup, everything else is incremental. You can configure your cloud storage provider to always maintain a local copy, this way, at worst you get a delayed setup, where backups are incremental and which I also assume, in most cases would be faster than taking physical devices from one place to another to maintain a safe copy of everything.
If Internet is down, the new files or new versions of files will be updated once Internet is back online. To me it's a very easy trade off to make, if my Internet connection is not super reliable. So I get online storage in addition to local copies most of the time, without the hassle and human error factor, plus geo redundancy.
Also, if I am super paranoid, I could copy stuff somewhere else "if" I am working on critical files "and if" there is a major outage (of Internet or cloud providers).
But that to me would be an edge case, for which there are easy workarounds. I'd hate to have my head space occupied with backup procedures.
Obviously each case is a case and there is no one size fits all on this, but I do believe online cloud storage covers most cases in an acceptably reliable way.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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To me the convenience alone is already worth the price. I personally like OneDrive, it has ransomware protection, versions all your files, so not only in the event of a ransomware, but also your own mistake, you can go back in time.
Moreover, having these files accessible on multiple devices, just makes everything so much easier. No manual process of backing up stuff, you just go keep on putting stuff there and it syncs.
I use Office364 family eidition, which gives not only me, but 5 other people from my family access to the office suite + 1TB of online storage each.
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
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Depends mostly on how "personal" you want to keep your data.
Google photos hasn't been hacked "properly" to the best of my knowledge (though vulnerabilities have been found in the past, and I'm pretty sure more will surface) you have to remember the iCloud hacks and repeat the mantra "nothing online is actually safe" if you have anything you don't want to be public.
Me? I use a combination of Google Photo, MS Onedrive, and formal backups to air-gapped media - but then I'm paranoid, probably. 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: I use a combination of Google Photo, MS Onedrive, and formal backups to air-gapped media - but then I'm paranoid, probably.
That makes it 2. I have photos on Google, google exports on laptop (2 copies on 2 disks), a back up on HDD.
I am tending to go towards online myself.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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A good Pendrive up to 3.0 (SanDisk/Samsung-like) with 64/128gb works fine on backup purposes!
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I keep as little as possible online.
My primary off-computer storage is a NAS containing two mirrored disks, to which all computers are backed up weekly. For longer-term storage (photos etc.), I backup to multiple external HDDs (rotating backups, whenever we come back from holiday or celebrate a birthday etc.).
Photos and videos are also copied to good-quality DVDs. These are easier to hand out to elderly relatives than loading everything on Google or some such...
The prices of SSDs are dropping, but for large (2+ TB) disks, they are still much more expensive than HDDs. SSDs are not designed for archival (10+ years) storage, and backups do not need the speed of SSDs.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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out of curiosity, do you keep those physical media off-site? (e.g. at a relative's home or your office). Multiple backups at home are no good if the home is burgled / flooded / inaccessible. That's why I now primarily use cloud storage for stuff I don't want to lose. (Photos are on a paid sub to Flickr, partly for security and partly to make accessible to others) whilst code is all on Helix version control (subversion simply 'cos that's what I'm used to). Everything else important but not confidential is held on my shared web hosting account, which has "unlimited" storage. The hosting co back it up daily (incl. off-site backups) so hardware failure shouldn't be an issue.
My only problem is that with different things in different places, and a lack of self-discipline, stuff sometimes doesn't get backed up as promptly as it should...
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I keep a backup set at the office, and rotate them.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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personal files, photos, etc.: google drive
code, similar: github
I don't backup anything to local storage or external local storage, everything is cloud based.
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I have a couple of NAS drives and Cloud.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Repurposed hardware running TrueNAS. Mirrored drives. If system fails, install OS in new hardware, connect the mirrored drives and import the pool. I also have a hardware RAID mirror in my system for shorter term and handy storage. I can mount either in a Linux system if necessary. The TrueNAS system is not on line except for backup.
Burglars? My place is such a mess, they would look around and say "we're too late, already been hit".
>64
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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lw@zi wrote: I read SDD are more fragile compared to HDD
I've never bought into that. A hard drive's platters rotates at thousands of RPMs with the heads flying less than a hair's thickness above them. Smack it hard enough and you're looking at a disaster.
Whereas there's nothing mechanical inside an SSD; I've dropped some on a hardwood floor and haven't had them show any sign of any problem.
lw@zi wrote: even HDD is fine as I do not really care about read write speeds.
Then there's your answer. For a backup drive, if I/O speed isn't an issue, then IMO a spinner will always win out - until SSDs catch up in terms of price/capacity. Heck, with the money you'll save with a spinner you can buy a spare one, or future-proof and buy extra capacity.
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I should have used better words. I read SDD is temperature sensitive (I am not going to pretend I understand any of this) while HDD is not. Hence reliance on it if I choose it.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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lw@zi wrote: I read SDD is temperature sensitive (I am not going to pretend I understand any of this) while HDD is not
"To what extent" would be my question. I have a NUC whose CPU has reached 100C a number of times (until I blew the dust out of it) - high enough to make the system shut itself down in a self-preservation attempt.
NUCs are compact, very tight inside, have a tiny fan and very little airflow. The SSD inside of it hasn't shown any sign of any problem.
Besides, if it's only going to be powered on when doing backups (as opposed to 24/7/365)...are you really that concerned about it running hot?
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If you are really concerned, get a DVD read write drive and put them on there.
Moist Von Lipwig
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A finalized DVD is ransomware proof, so keeping all critical documents on DVD is a good idea.
I work with the understanding that hardware failure is a "when", not an "if". So I have 2 SSD in my desktop, an external HD, several portable HD, an external HD caddy, and a stack of old EIDE and SSD drives. [I replace my main HD every 2 years.] Between all this I have sufficient backups that I don't worry about hardware failure.
Online systems are ok for most files, although I operate under the assumption that access can be cut at any time. OTOH, anything financial stays local only.
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An external drive you can grab on the way out; an SSD not so much. If you bugger up your account, you may lose your online backups.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Multi-pronged approach
1. All "data" is on a RAID 1 array. (Save my butt twice in 10 years when one of the drives went out)
2. That is imaged (Macrium Reflect) to a large external USB drive (cheap and efficient)
3. That is backed up to BackBlaze along with almost the entire system (warranty against ransomware because I have a 1 year retention)
Just added the Backblaze component this year. Best decision I've made all year.
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My system is very similar. Offline copies for ransomware protection. Ability to restore everything in house without external internet access. Do what you need to do to satisfy those two conditions. Then test it to make sure it will work when needed.
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The rule hoary old IT professionals use (born of long and sometimes painful experience) is: You need at least three copies of anything you don't want to lose. That is, your working copy plus at least two backups sets. A set will usually have at least the last three backups on it, in case the most recent, or its preceding one, turn out to be faulty. Sometimes errors occur right in the middle of a backup, rendering it useless.
Of the two backups, one should be local (SSD, HDD, NAS, whatever) and one off-site in case of disasters like fire or a very thorough burglar. You can achieve off-site by having two (preferably three) hard drives, keeping one at, say, the office or nearby relatives', and rotating them using the grandfather-father-son principle. Why three? Well, say you only have two and you bring the HDD from the office home on an evening to do the next backup, intending to take the other drive to the office in the morning. For a night, both drives are in the same place and the worst happens...
Or your off-site backup could use a cloud backup service. Note that OneDrive, Google Drive etc are not backup services: they are synchronisation services. If you accidentally delete a file or it gets corrupted and you subsequently need to restore it, you will find that it has already gone from your cloud drive, and worse, the change has been replicated to all the other computers you had linked to the same account. OneDrive does give you a 30 day window when you can reclaim files from the online recycle bin, but that is all. It is not an archive. Microsoft's terminology gets confusing here, describing the service correctly as a synchronisation service most of the time, then having a tab named Backup. Bad! That said, it is good for wholesale restoration of files to their last known state after a disaster and has saved many a person's bacon.
So the short answer to your either/or question is 'both'!
The choice between HDD and SSD is less important than having multiple tested backups in place and keeping them up to date. You choice will hinge on cost, capacity and longevity: nothing lasts for ever, you can drop an external drive at any time, so I rely on two local and one cloud solution for my personal files. DVDs deteriorate over time as well: I have many over 10 years old that cannot be read any more, so check and copy them every few years.
Don't forget that you also need system backups on a less frequent cadence, which can be local (on the grounds that they are rather large for uploading to the cloud and in the event of a disaster, you have to buy a new computer anyway so the previous one's system won't be much use (though Win10 is getting quite good at converting itself for different hardware these days).
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At work my data is backed up on a nightly schedule to a personal network folder on one of our build servers. That server has a 24TB external RAID array which collects these backups along with those from our other build machines. All of this is automated, and I receive an email every morning from the process with a summarized log.
I use two external drives to back up my home machine. The one drive contains a recent full backup and one or more differential backups courtesy of Macrium Reflect[^], which run automatically at night. The second drive is a 'mirror' backup data backup of everything on the machine that is neither Windows nor installed software. This one is updated using robocopy on demand, with an icon in the Start menu. Two clicks and it runs, and typically only takes a few seconds. This pair of drives gets swapped with a second pair fairly regularly. I'm reasonably confident that this scheme leaves me with less than a day's recovery time should something awful happen.
The mirror drives and one of the backup drives are SSD's. The remaining backup drive is a hard drive at the moment, but will be replaced fairly soon. I don't have hard data about the fragility of SSD's versus hard drives, but my personal experience has been for SSD's to be more physically robust.
I'm not willing to pay for 1-2TB of online 'cloud' storage for backups. This is not to mention the routine security breaches incurred by these services.
Software Zen: delete this;
modified 22-Dec-21 10:27am.
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I am in the process of setting up redundant backups, using the cloud and 2 local SSDs as well as regularly making a VM from my machine. I recently had a computer failure where my computer died, and somehow it managed to kill my backup flash drive which was attached at the time. All lost in a microsecond. Fortunately, the folks in my IT dept were able to retrieve the data off my computer. Lesson learned. An important thing going forward will be to always be redundant and keep updated with current tech. Remember all those floppy backups?
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SSDs are more likely to give no warning of failure and more likely to fail in ways where nothing is recoverable. But they are fast.
I don't know how much you have to backup, but cloud storage with a reliable company has the huge advantage of not having your backup lost to the same disaster (fire, flood, theft, asteroid, etc.) as the original. If you use Microsoft office, a family 365 plan gets you 5 terabytes of cloud storage (in five 1 terabyte chunks) in addition to perpetually latest Office Apps.
As for backup tools, I've tried or used most paid and free alternatives. Macrium Reflect is in a league of its own for home use. They have a version that's free for home use although the free version omits incremental backups. Incremental saves so much time and space (and bandwidth for backing up to cloud), it's well worth springing for the paid version after confirming you're happy with the free.
I don't even use virtual machines for testing or trials I can finish in a setting anymore. I run an incremental backup right before testing since an automated incremental was done not long before, that takes less time than getting a cup of coffee. Then I disable the drive I backed up to (Macrium software protects its own backups but I'm super cautious). Install what I want to test, do the test/trial and then restore from the incremental.
All backups run in the background off shadow-copies. Volume restores occur under PE environment. Volume backups can be mounted with or without write ability and can even be opened as virtual machines if your hardware is capable or you use compatible virtual machine software. So much more.
Check it out. No affiliation.
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