A cheap external drive or a cloud subscription? They protect against different things — here’s when each wins, and why you might want both.
An external drive costs £50 once. Cloud backup costs a few quid a month forever. So which?
Wins on: speed, one-off cost, no subscription. Loses on: it’s in your house (fire/flood/theft take it too), it can fail, and “I’ll remember to plug it in” usually means you won’t.
Wins on: automatic, offsite, safe from anything local, version history. Loses on: ongoing cost, slower restores of huge amounts.
Use both. A drive (or a NAS) for fast local copies, and an automatic cloud backup for the offsite safety net. That’s the 3-2-1 rule — and it’s cheaper than it sounds.