external hard drive or online back up

I use external hard drives to image my system but have been reading that onlne storage is gaining in popularity. Are such places like Win 7 Skyline and Cloud better/safer to use than the usb drives? If they are as safe, it would be nice to backup and recover from an onlne site in case of fire or theft. I do not notice that there is a cost for such a service -do you kow?

Hi Peter, This is an interesting question and you are right , backing up to online storage is gaining popularity.
However let me put some thoughts forward for your consideration:

1 Using on line storage entails you having confidence in the storage facility, that the storage will be secure and access controlled so that unauthorised folks are kept away from it (you are essentially passing your back up material over to someone….) you need to have confidence that they will look after it properly and take steps to back it up themseves, otherwise if their storage fails, your data could go with it!

2 On line back up with reputable organisations can be very useful, especially if backing up files or folders with your photos, documents, music, videos etc . However it can be limited by:

3 the amount of storage space available

4 the speed of your Internet connection.

5 You may have an ultra fast fibre optic broadband connection with speeds around 100Mbps (you would be very fortunate but these sort of speeds are possible) and if so the speed is unlikely to be a great barrier…..but if you are like a lot of folks running on a good old copper wire at a download speed of say 4 or 5Mbps on a standard ADSL broadband connection then it could prove very difficult for the large file sizes needed to achieve the most common size of disc image that we are usually dealing with. With ADSL it means what it says..the speed is asymmetric..the upload speed is often lower by a considerable factor than the download speed available somethimes it is only 10% of the download speed……

4 I will leave you to do the maths, particulary as only you know the upload and download speed of your connection…but if for example I was to store a disc image of 50GB online and upload it via my copper wire ADSL broadband connection …….the time taken would be measured in months…Yes, that's right, months! (and that's assuming that the computer would be running 24 hours a day 7 days a week and doing nothing much else, other than uploading the disc image …… however when it comes to retrieving the image file the time would be shorter, but still for me totally hopeless. For this reason the answer for me on my connection speed has to be say, an external hard drive.

5 To sum up online storage can be suitable especially for smaller size back ups, or with ultra fast connections ( but do calculate the times needed before using or buying online storage)
Here's a link to a site with some details that might be helpful
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/8-o…ge-sites-673945
Hope this helps
Regards
paws

I use both local and online backup. The online is strictly for security in case of some local catastrophe that destroys my computer. The first backup is agonizingly slow. On my Desktop system (this one) I backup only data and it took about 17 hours. On my Webserver, it ran continuously for 7 or 8 days to backup a total of 21GB of data (my entire web server). For both f these the restore will be quicker as my ISP provides 20MB down and 2MB up. Acronis and a 2nd internal or an external hard drive is the way to go with online as your safety net.

nobody mentioned privacy, and is one reason why i wouldn't use a cloud for backups of my data, i have nothing really important, but i still want it to be my choice of who gets to see/use it and not put it out there for any tom, dick or harry who may be able to gain access to it without my permission. i really hate the idea of all these companies using cloud to store our personal and private data like medical or banking details, etc, there's just to many instances of such data being accessed by the wrong people already and i can only see things getting worse with cloud computing, not better/safer.

I now have a much better understanding of on line back ups than I did by 'surfing' for information. Because of this information update I can sensibly develope my backup plan. Hunt and peck typing does not allow for elaboration but thank you al once gain for your kind assisstance. Suffice today that online backups for my situation may be a way off. Thank you Peter