With the maturity and widely availability, not to mention the cost of cloud storage these days, almost all organisations will looking at embracing a cloud based file server back and moving away from their on-prem solutions. Lets quickly look at the pro and cons of cloud based backup in a general sense.
Pros of Cloud Backup Service
- Secured and safe way of backing up data on a remote data storage
- Access to your data from anywhere
- In the most of the plans backup is cheap
- Inbuilt disaster recovery facility
- Data backup can be automated
- No need to worry about maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure or running out of capacity
Cons of Cloud Backup Service
- Usually high Internet channel is needed, i.e. upstream
- Your data is stored on third party servers, if something will be wrong with them or your provider will close the service, then you need to worry about your data
- Most of the Cloud Backup service providers charge based on data backed up. So, if you have more data, then you will be charged more.
Some of the basic backup requirements are off-site storage and backup retention. I would go as far and say that restoring files, that perhaps have been delete or overwritten accidentally is not one of those basic requirements even though it’s covered. With disk storage being so cheap your first “line of defence" for restoring files should be either Shadow Copy if you are running a a Windows based file server or some kind of disk based snapshot. In any case, unless you have to perform a disaster recovery or you need to provide historical data, there should be no need to revert to you backups.