Is cloud backup good enough

[RayM]

I used to back up around twice a month to an external hard disk but now I rely on One Drive. A friend who's a bit more clued up than me told me I should still keep up with the hard disk backup.

Is the cloud good enough or should I do both.

 

[strollin]

One reason for having both would be so that you could recover from a catastrophic failure where your hard drive completely fails and could no longer boot. How would you access the files in OneDrive then? You should have a disk image of your system locally for that reason.

 

[root]

Hey @RayM - welcome to Computer Forums

As @strollin has pointed out a local backup is helpful, especially if you do a whole system backup (it's a feature that's built into Windows & relatively easy to do - I must admit I should do this more often but I no longer have a NAS running to backup to)

Ultimately no cloud solution will run forever - Microsoft might decide to shut down Onedrive for example. I myself stored some treasured pictures on Dropbox many years ago - went to download them only to find my account expired (and the notifications went to my old email).

It's always good to have multiple copies, even better to have them in different locations.

Another thing worth bearing in mind is if you rely on cloud sync and get hit by ransomware, there's a good chance the encrypted files will be uploaded, overwriting y our actual files and you may or may not be able to get a previous version.