Re:"It's the (Backblaze) restores that fail."
by acdha on Monday January 20, 2014 @10:59PM
(#7093346)
> the chances of something physically happening to your local backup (the hardware fails, someone knocks it off the shelf, it gets lost in a move, there's a fire) is vastly greater than the chance that your online provider loses your data.
This is the key part: almost all of the failure modes affecting local storage also endanger local backups. Cloud backups are intrinsically less risky in that regard, although a local provider might still be affected by a massive natural disaster.
The remaining class of errors, however, are nasty ones like bit rot, human error or malice – all of which are tricky to prevent.
As far as I know, the chances of something physically happening to your local backup (the hardware fails, someone knocks it off the shelf, it gets lost in a move, there's a fire) is vastly greater than the chance that your online provider loses your data.
Yes, obviously it's better to have both, but the fact that cloud is both off-site and stored redundantly off-site makes cloud the obvious first choice for most people (since most people are not setting up RAID arrays at separate locations).