It depends on how and what you want to back up.
It depends on the kind of backup you want.
What many people want in a cloud backup isn’t typically practical.
At the other end of the spectrum, what many people think is a cloud backup isn’t really a backup.
Nonetheless, the cloud can be part of a healthy breakfast… er, healthy backup strategy.
Backing up to the cloud
Not all cloud backups are the same. Full image backups are too big to upload for most people. Services like Carbonite cover your data, but not everything. Your best bet is a regular local image backup plus a syncing tool like OneDrive for your working files.
Full machine backups
Many people expect backing up to the cloud to be the equivalent of an image: a complete copy of their hard drive, so that if the hard drive ever fails, they can download their backup to a replacement hard drive and carry on as if nothing happened.
Awesome in theory, but typically impractical.
The issue is that full image backups are huge. For example, the backup of my C: drive alone, created by Macrium Reflect, is over 350 gigabytes.1 That this is huge isn’t really the problem; it’s that on a typical home internet connection, it would take forever to upload to the cloud! Daily updates could, in some cases, take longer than 24 hours to upload. In either case, your backups would likely impact the speed of your internet connection as you tried to use it for other things.
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Naturally, downloading it to restore an entire machine would take a long time as well.
That’s not to say it’s not possible. Services like iDrive offer entire machine backup. Maybe it’s practical for someone with a very fast internet connection, but for most people, I would expect not.
What is practical for everyone is to perform that full machine image backup to a local, external hard disk. That’s the foundation of a good backup strategy.
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Online data backup services
If you’re going for a traditional backup, services like iDrive, Carbonite, and others can be solid choices. Those two in particular have been around forever and work well for many people.
The issue is that they back up only your data. Your operating system, settings, applications, and so on are generally not included. In addition, while those programs attempt to automatically identify where your data lives, they have to make assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions are wrong. You may not find out until you need something that it was never included in the backup at all.
Again, they’re good solutions if this is a route you want to take, but take the time to understand what is and is not included in the backups they perform, as well as how you would go about adding something if it’s not there by default.
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Data sync services
Tools like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and others are often referred to as cloud backup — but they aren’t. These are tools designed to synchronize your data across multiple machines and the cloud.
Now, in a sense, that’s a backup. For example, if you lose your laptop while traveling, the files you were working on that were stored in, say, OneDrive are still in OneDrive. You’ll find them online at OneDrive.com, and on any computers using the same OneDrive account. The files will automatically reappear when you set up OneDrive on your replacement machine.
But in an important sense, it’s not a backup at all. Delete a file in the OneDrive folder on your machine, and it’s deleted everywhere, including from the OneDrive cloud and any other machines using the same account. Yes, there’s a recycle bin online, but the point is that this is not the behavior of a true backup. And I’ve heard from too many people who’ve lost data because of this misunderstanding of what OneDrive (and Dropbox, and Google Drive, and others) are or are not.
But that’s not to say they can’t be part of a healthy backup strategy. They can, when used properly.
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A healthy backup strategy
Here’s what I recommend in general.
- Take full image backups periodically, to a local, external hard disk, NAS, or other networked device. This backs up everything. I recommend once a month.
- Take periodic incremental image backups to update that local, external hard disk, NAS, or other networked device. I recommend daily.
- Store your data files in the OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive folder on your computer2, with the corresponding app configured and running. This backs up your working files to the cloud as you make changes.
This is, in my opinion, the best of both worlds. It makes use of the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of local and cloud backups. My article How to Back Up Windows covers it in more detail.
Do this
Do I need to say it? Back up. Whatever you do, however you do it, back up. Hopefully, the plan outlined above gives you a solid foundation for a robust backup strategy.
Trust me: someday, you’ll be glad you did.
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Footnotes & References
1: Yours will vary, I’m sure, but it’s likely to be very, very large, nonetheless.
2: If you’re concerned about your files being on “someone else’s computer”, then use a tool like Cryptomator to automatically encrypt your files, keeping them safe from prying eyes.
Yes, a local full disk image backup (Macrium) and some number of incremental backups merged into the full backup will give you a “synthetic” full backup. This should be made locally and stored locally. You can sync your full image and incrementals (Macrium) to a cloud location, such as Wasabi, for off-site, immutable, full-system data protection. You will need sufficient internet bandwidth, but if you do the sync at night, it may not matter how long it takes. And you would be compliant with the “3-2-1 backup principle,” which was invented by Peter Krough, a photographer, who was looking for a method to back up his digital photographic images. I see Carbonite used by people to back up their “data” files, which typically do not include the application programs or the operating system files. Leo is right about using cloud “sync” services, which should never be confused with having a backup. That said, I do have my Google Workspace Gmail and Google Docs backed up using a separate cloud backup service not owned by Google.
I switched from using OneDrive to Google Drive. The way I setup both was to keep the files in the OneDrive or Google Drive folders always on my computer by turning off the Files on Demand feature in OneDrive and setting up Google Drive to mirror the files in the Google Drive folder.
Those files exist in the online folders and on my computer, which gets backed up using Macrium Reflect, giving me both local and offsite backups. I use Cryptomator to encrypt files stored in Google Drive. Once a month, I copy the contents of my Cryptomator vault to an external drive unencrypted to prevent losing access in the event of an issue with Cryptomator.
For those using OneDrive and choosing to use Cryptomator to encrypt their files: Be aware that when setting up Cryptomator and moving files into the Cryptomator vault, OneDrive will warn about a possible ransomware attack and offer to restore your OneDrive files. Once the encryption process is completed, OneDrive will consider the files as any other files and the warnings will stop.