[Explained] Cloud Backup – What Is It & How Does It Work?

What Is Cloud Backup?

What is cloud backup? Different from traditional/local backup that more relies on physical storage, cloud backup will be more flexible. Before you learn about cloud backup, you can know more about cloud storage.

Cloud storage is used to store data on the Internet via a third-party cloud computing provider. Cloud storage has been applied in many situations, such as analytics and data lakes, backup and disaster recovery, or cloud data migration.

When you perform a cloud backup, cloud storage will be a necessary part to store your backed-up files and data. But notice that they are not the same thing. Cloud backup emphasizes that the backed-up data can be recovered back to its original state while cloud storage doesn’t need that.

To make the definition easy to understand, cloud backup, also called online backup, often relies on third-party cloud providers that offer the use of their servers for backup services. There are plenty of services available on the market, such as iCloud, Dropbox, etc.

Besides, this backup method has been widely applied by individuals and businesses for its special features. For example, when some natural disasters or human-made accidents devastate the physical data storage, cloud storage can be your best backup destination to recover the data.

NAS vs Cloud – What’s the Difference and Which Is Better?

What’s the difference between NAS and cloud? Which one is better for you? This article will give you a detailed comparison between them.

Read More

How Does Cloud Backup Restore Data?

There are different types of cloud backup solutions and data recovery is mainly decided by the requirements of businesses or individuals.

For example, if you have chosen a third-party cloud backup service and signed up for some services like daily backup or full backup, then the provider will collect, compress, encrypt, and store the relevant data as part of a predetermined schedule.

You can choose to back up your data as scheduled or different backup schemes – full, incremental, and differential backup.

Full backup – files and folders will be backed up entirely in any subsequent backup operations.

Incremental backup – the files that have changed will be backed up since the last backup operation of any type of backup.

Differential backup – the files that have changed will be backed up since the last full backup.

Cloud Backup Vs Cloud Disaster Recovery

It is easy to confuse the definitions between cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery. They are definitely not the same thing.

The major difference between them is the required backed-up content. Cloud disaster recovery tends to use backed-up data to recover from a disaster, which requires a large amount of data, systems, application software, drivers, and utilities being backed up.

Besides, to make sure this huge workload can be handled, the initiator needs to consider all kinds of situations, such as the consuming time and required bandwidth and resources.

While cloud backup is more commonly used than cloud disaster recovery. For example, your photo saved on your phone can be automatically synced to the cloud with your permission. Because of the flexible storage space, businesses are inclined to choose cloud backup or cloud disaster recovery to be their plan B for unexpected risks.

But is that enough? Is cloud backup the best choice to cope with cyber-attacks or other potential data loss?

10 Best Free Cloud Storage Services to Back up Photos/Videos

List of 2019 best 10 free cloud storage services to back up your photos, videos, music, files. Select the preferred free cloud storage to upload files, photos.

Read More

Is Cloud Backup Enough?

Cloud backup has many advantages attracting people to choose it but it still has some cons you need to be aware of.

1. Cloud backup will make you lose some control over it and rely on the backup provider.
2. Cloud backup seriously relies on the Internet connection. If the connection is down, the data will be inaccessible.
3. Storing your data off-site can increase the chances of it being compromised by hackers.

Faced with the above situations, we still highly recommend you perform a local backup to cope with cyber-attacks.

MiniTool ShadowMaker can help you back up your important data, including systems, disks, partitions, files, and folders, to an external hard drive, which would be the best solution to cyber-attacks. When you have both a local backup and a cloud backup, the security level will be doubled.

MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Bottom Line:

After reading this article, you may have an overall picture of cloud backup. Even though cloud backup is convenient and boasts many advantages, considering your data security, we still suggest you back up data to an external hard drive. If you have any questions, welcome to leave messages.