Took me three hard drive failures to switch to cloud backups

I had a Seagate 4TB external die on me last month at my office in Boise. Lost six years of client tax records because I thought the drive was fine. I always told people local backups were safer than cloud storage. Now I pay $12 a month for Backblaze and sleep better at night. Has anyone else had a hardware failure that pushed them to change their setup?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_bailey1mo ago

Respectfully disagree. Local drives let me restore 2TB in an afternoon, not a week.

troy4391mo ago

Used to be in your camp, Kevin. Had three external drives in rotation and thought I was bulletproof. Then my main backup drive started clicking one night and I watched six months of work disappear overnight. Cloud restore took a weekend and that hurt, but losing data completely hurts way worse and lasts forever. Local backups are fast when they work, but they fail way more often than people want to admit. Cloud is the only thing that keeps me from waking up in a cold sweat anymore.