Speed and availability
One of the main reasons for backing up important data is that it can be readily recovered in the event of an outage, data breach, ransomware, or loss. However, while cloud backups are convenient for day-to-day stuff like individual files or folders, they’re dreadfully slow when it comes to restoring large swaths of data after a catastrophic loss.
Downloading several terabytes of data from a cloud provider can take hours or even days, depending on the speed of your connection. A local drive, on the other hand, can transfer data way faster and gives you more options on how to actually access that data — over your network, with a USB cable, or even installing directly into your PC.
Think about it. Why do cloud backup companies like BackBlaze offer restore-by-mail programs, where they ship out a hard drive or flash drive with your data on it, which you can then return for a refund? It’s just plain faster and more secure than going over the internet.
Backblaze
Local storage also means your data is always available. Even if you have an ultra-fast internet connection, there’s nothing you can do if you experience an internet outage, nor can you do anything if your cloud provider goes down for any reason. Services may promise 99.9 percent uptime, but that 0.1 percent is always there — and according to Murphy’s law, it’ll go down when you most need it.
In July 2024, the infamous CrowdStrike disaster took down Windows computers across the world, rendering many sites and services inoperable for extended periods. Similarly, outages at AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, Google, et al. have killed entire chunks of the internet until issues could be addressed.
And let’s not forget that cloud services can go down permanently and you could lose all your data overnight. Is it likely? Maybe not, especially with giants like Google and Microsoft. They’ll probably give you some kind of heads up… but even so, scrambling to clone all your data before some arbitrary deadline could be a pain. Not so if you maintain local backups, at least of your most important files and folders.
Cloud backups are here to stay, I’m not arguing that. Cloud backups are good to have — as one of several options. Local backups are still important because you never know when cloud backups won’t be there for you. The only way to guarantee your data is available when you need it? Store it locally on premises.
