Is cloud backup enough?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboomoom here for
askleo.com. Here's the question.
"Rather than using an external hard drive, what's your opinion and or advice about
backing up to the cloud, such as is with Carbonite?
Wouldn't that be the simplest way?
Also, since I have backup disks of my operating system and factory
settings, is it necessary to also back up my OS?
I'd really rather not trust an external
unit which could be damaged, just like my laptop."
I'm a big fan of cloud storage. I am.
I happen to use them all,
not the backup services, but you could achieve the same kinds
of backups, the same kinds of things that they offer using cloud services like
Dropbox and OneDrive and Google Drive and many, many others.
And yet they are not a replacement for a full backup.
They can be part of the solution, but they are not the entire solution.
So one of the things that's important to realize about most cloud backup
solutions is that they don't back up everything.
It's very important to understand what they do and do not back up most.
I have to say most because it varies, but most focus on your data, which is great.
Don't get me wrong.
That's good stuff to back up, but it's only your data.
Many, for example, will default to backing
up only the stuff that's in your documents folder, or maybe your documents
and pictures and videos, folders or whatever,
leaving the rest of the information on your machine not backed up.
That's why I say it's part because it
actually is a very good way to back up your data.
It backs things up automatically.
I have articles on the topic for using things like Dropbox and OneDrive for what
I call nearly continuous online backup, and it's offsite backup,
which is one of the important approaches that many experts will agree is something
you want to consider when you're backing up.
You have backups locally in your home or your business.
But it's also good to have important data backed up off site.
And cloud backup, by definition, is off site, and the data that you're
using is definitely your most important stuff.
Again, assuming you are aware of exactly what is and is not getting backed up
by whatever backup or cloud data service you happen to be using.
Now there's another problem, and that is what I call the limits.
An online backup is going to use your Internet connection, possibly heavily.
So that will vary depending on two important things.
One, obviously the amount of data that is involved in the backup.
So if you've got a lot of data in your
documents folder, of course, the first time it's going to back up,
it's going to take some time for that to get backed up.
It's going to take some time to transmit
all of that from your machine to the cloud backup service.
The other component of that, of course, is the speed of your Internet connection.
In other words, if you've got a relatively
fast Internet connection, it may not be that impactful,
but if you've got a relatively slow Internet connection and I'm not going
to try and define fast and slow because that changes dramatically over time.
But if you've got an internet connection that you're already, for example,
experiencing as kind of pokey, then it's possible that uploading all of this
data to back it up could end up impacting your online experience while the backup
happens, even though it's only uploading
that upload, which in many cases is at a slower rate than your ability
to download, still impacts your ability to request files.
Because, for example,
when you visit a website, you're asking that remote site,
you're sending data somewhere that says, Please get me this page.
Well, that request, then, is competing for your upload bandwidth
with all of the data that's being backed up.
If there's a lot of data on a slow
connection, then that could end up impacting you for a period of time.
How long? I don't know, because it depends on both
the size of the data and the speed of the connection.
But the bottom line is that there are
limits to what's reasonable to expect here at home.
I've got a reasonably fast Internet
connection, but even so, when I've got something large uploading
like, say, I suddenly throw a few gigabytes of photos into my Dropbox, then,
yeah, everything else gets a little slower for a while.
So that's something that's really, really important to realize is that
the characteristics of the data that you're trying to back up and your
Internet connection itself may make online backup impractical.
It may work, but it may also render
the concept impractical for your specific situation.
And there is one very specific scenario
that I want to call out as being impractical for everybody.
I don't even do this, and that is image backups.
I'm a big fan of image backups.
I think that they are a cornerstone
to a backup strategy that will protect you from almost any type of data loss.
But image backups are big, sometimes very big.
Sometimes they're as big as your hard
drive, whatever the capacity of your hard drive is, or however,
how much data there is on your hard drive, they can be really, really big.
In that case, it doesn't matter how fast your Internet connection is.
It's going to take a long time to upload
that data, and depending on how it's throttled, or if it's throttled,
that could again continue to impact your ability to use your Internet effectively.
But it gets worse.
If the data that you're trying to upload
using this image backup is large enough and your Internet connection is slow
enough, then all of a sudden, if you've got a daily backup strategy,
as I recommend, if it takes a day and a half to upload one
day's worth of backup, you can never catch up.
Your Internet connection will be always used uploading data,
and you'll never actually be able to upload everything in a timely fashion.
Image backups backups of your entire hard
disk simply are not something that you can do using cloud storage.
And it's interesting because at some point
you want to say, well, internet connections are going to get faster.
They will. Absolutely, they will.
Cloud storage is going to get bigger. Absolutely.
It will. There'll be lots of room for it online,
but at the same time, your hard disks are getting bigger and bigger.
The operating system is getting bigger and bigger.
The amount of stuff we have on our machine is also getting bigger and bigger.
So what seems like a big image backup
today may some day be a small one, but by that time the image backups taken
then will also be proportionately larger as well.
It's a game of catch up where it's just never going to catch up.
So image backups?
No, that's not something that you want to attempt using a cloud backup solution,
regardless of which cloud backup solution you attempt to use.
Now,
why not both?
And in fact, that's generally what I recommend.
If you take a look at many of my articles, on backing up throughout
Ask Leo.
You'll see that I often recommend a blend where you have a regular I suggest daily,
but it doesn't have to be image backup of your machine so that you've got
something that is everything stored locally on an external hard drive that you
can revert to for malware for hardware failures, for whatever.
In addition, you might then use cloud storage of some
sort cloud backup of some sort, be it a Carbonite type application or some
other kind of application that is a dedicated backup tool or even online
services like Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Drive.
If you use them both, you kind of get the best of both worlds.
You get the coverage of an image backup stored locally, but you get the immediacy
of cloud backup because it's basically updating things as you change the files
and you get the offsite storage that I mentioned earlier.
So don't use cloud backup as your only
backup solution, but it can be part of a very robust backup
solution that happens to include local image backups.
I hope that helps clarify exactly why I feel this way about cloud backups.
They're great, but they have limitations, but those limitations are easily overcome
with things you can do yourself for updates.
For related links for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/6386
I'm Leo Notenboom, this is
askleo.com/6386