[Answer] Which Is Better for Backup: External Hard Drives or Cloud Storage?

[Answer] Which Is Better for Backup: External Hard Drives or Cloud Storage?

At current price levels, there are indeed some relatively affordable ways to solve the problem of large-capacity storage. For individual users, using a NAS home cloud system is a good option. Among the commonly used NAS systems today, Synology and TerraMaster are relatively well known. Other companies, such as Western Digital, are also gradually moving toward private cloud systems.

If you set up a private cloud system at home, you can avoid the cost of renting public cloud storage. In some ways, your data storage can also be more secure. All you really need is to purchase hard drives and NAS hardware, plus a small amount of internet bandwidth cost—usually just your normal household internet plan—and electricity.

There are many guides available online for building and buying a private cloud NAS system. For individual users, here are a few suggestions regarding data storage and backup: for data that is completely unimportant, you can use RAID 0 without making backups. For valuable data, it is best to use three drives per group in RAID 5, or two drives mirroring each other in RAID 1, to provide real-time data protection.