“best” depends on the particulars of your situation. Cloud backup is one of the easiest but over time can be expensive. In the long run buying a second same-sized drive is cheaper than online backup, but it requires more money up front, and having the original and backup in the same physical location doesn’t protect against local disasters like a waterpipe bursting flood. There are specialized tape drives for backups, which are cheap per mb and so you can make lots of separate backups which makes your data safer, but they’re very slow to read and write. And there’s other option too, like optical disks, raid arrays, etc.
Best i can really say is to do some online research to figure out what’s right for your particular case.
Very interesting to know, but i just looked it up and it still seems expensive in the long run. Azure’s cheapest storage tier is 1 dollar per TB per month. So 5 TB of backup would cost 60 bucks a year, but a 5 TB drive costs about 120 bucks. So after 2 years of cloud backup it costs you an extra 60 bucks a year every year vs. if you just bought a hard drive.
So what’s the best way to back up a single drive?
“best” depends on the particulars of your situation. Cloud backup is one of the easiest but over time can be expensive. In the long run buying a second same-sized drive is cheaper than online backup, but it requires more money up front, and having the original and backup in the same physical location doesn’t protect against local disasters like a waterpipe bursting flood. There are specialized tape drives for backups, which are cheap per mb and so you can make lots of separate backups which makes your data safer, but they’re very slow to read and write. And there’s other option too, like optical disks, raid arrays, etc.
Best i can really say is to do some online research to figure out what’s right for your particular case.
Thanks for the response! I’ll have to look up some software for automatic backups.
Cloud cost is pretty cheap, especially if you do cold storage.
Where they get you is egress fees.
Very interesting to know, but i just looked it up and it still seems expensive in the long run. Azure’s cheapest storage tier is 1 dollar per TB per month. So 5 TB of backup would cost 60 bucks a year, but a 5 TB drive costs about 120 bucks. So after 2 years of cloud backup it costs you an extra 60 bucks a year every year vs. if you just bought a hard drive.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/#pricing