Always do both. Ideally have three copies of your data at all times. For the most important stuff, I also sent a drive to a family member in a different part of the county in case of natural disaster.
VEEAM makes a local backup every night, but all my Windows libraries are mapped to a Google drive. Anything saved there automatically syncs to the cloud.
More practical: the main version is on my desktop PC. That one gets synced automatically to my NAS. This NAS makes a nightly incremental backup to a cloud provider.
Once you have a setup like this, maintaining it is peanuts. Pay the bills on time and setup email alerts to let you know if drives are going bad or you’re reaching your storage limits.
You do need to ensure you’re testing your recovery plans once in a while. A backup is worthless if you can’t restore it
When I reached Google Photos max capacity, I invested in a good 4 bay Synology NAS with 16TB. I left the old photos and documents in Google Cloud but all new ones go to the NAS.
I’m really happy with the NAS. I’m aware I could have saved money with a homebuilt one, but I wasn’t botheres tinkering.
I wouldn’t necessarily trust a cloud so I would encrypt my files before uploading and wouldn’t use the cloud as my only solution. Because they guarantee for nothing and could just delete your account or their service. But it can expand your backup with another layer.
(Haven’t found my perfect solution, just some thoughts)
Like I said I haven’t found my ideal solution yet. I’m using multiple offline harddrives at my home and at my parents home. So my backup is more or less save from most problems/attacks. But its not really up to date and its a lot of manual work always pluging them in when I want to make a backup und copying the files.
I have a server in the garage with a big RAID array, and I run a Nephele WebDAV server on it. All my PCs, and my family’s PCs back up to it every 3 days.
It also streams all my movies and TV shows on a Jellyfin server.
Also, to be extra cautious, I have a server at my in laws’ house with a 20TB hard drive that I periodically sync that RAID array to.
Apple ecosystem so: iPhone > iCloud Photo Library (imported all digital photos over the years through iPhoto, later Photos) > Mac Photos app (set to download all originals) > Time Machine backup on my Synology NAS with redundancy
And because I’m a belt and suspenders kind of guy:
Tip: Have a look at osxphotos, an open source software you can run on your Mac and export all your Apple Photos to your own full structure, including any metadata. So you get a copy that is independent on Apple photos and can be used in any photo library system later, if need be. I send that export to my Synology and C2 every day. I guess I just don’t liked Synology photos backup from phone, had to manually open it all the time.
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