What happens if your house burns down with the drive in it? That’s the main point, you either need a drive off-site or you need cloud storage, which is off-site.
Net access is getting fast enough now that it makes sense to keep frequently accessed data on the cloud. As someone who is running an online radio station, I have several systems that are generating small but important files. I need those files to meet license reporting requirements and can’t lose them. Having them immediately auto backup to the cloud is vital. As well, if I somehow get hit with ransomware and my files get encrypted, OneDrive lets me jump back to just before it happened and recover most of my data and file library.
Both of the above entities could have recovered within hours if they had a proper cloud recovery setup.
@shutterbug You make a good arguement - for those with critical information that needs to be kept. But for me PERSONALLY i dont need such a service. So its no use to me.
My Backups are mostly games - and my most precious photos are kept on a USB Stick.
I’m hesitant to go down the external route and not even sure anyway where I could put it if I had one. My laptop is on a small folding table . There’s a wooden filing cabinet forward left of that that has the mouse and mouse pad on it… There’s nowhere I could put such a drive .
Even if I could I’d still be hesitant. I had an external about a decade ago . I had a load of mp3s on it. The external stopped working ,and I lost all the mp3s . Have not downloaded any music since then .
Recommend three USB sticks. Two on-site, one off. NAND flash is damn tough to recover data from when it fails, so you’ll want a spare. Rotate through them.
