Should you back up to the cloud?

Question

Backup

Colleagues all welcome!
I would like to know your informed opinion.
The guide suggests doing a backup to the cloud, in order not to buy a server for backups. While the point is not about money, I want to first understand whether there is a point, and who has come across what is your opinion?
Documents, drawings and sql bases will be copied. Copying VMs to the cloud is not yet considered.
After reading boarding schools, Acronis offers interesting services. What do you think?

Answer 1

Should you back up to the cloud?

Yes, this is a good addition to the local backup storage.

The guide suggests doing a backup to the cloud, in order not to buy a server for backups.

First, they buy a server for backups, set up backup, and then duplicate it in the cloud if desired.

After reading boarding schools, Acronis offers interesting services. What do you think?

Expensive and not very trustworthy. Amazon S3 Glacier will obviously be better.
PS
In my opinion, Glacier is the ideal storage for backups - quite reliable, and the lowest prices for storage. It is somewhat difficult to master, and the price of getting data from there is quite high - but this is cold data, which ideally should not be pulled out from there. Only as a last resort. And a local backup is a must - especially if you have decent amounts of data. You just evaluate the width of your channels, and the speed of return from the cloud, and think about how long it will take you to pull out data in case of an emergency, when you need to resume the work of critical services for the organization as soon as possible.

Answer 2

Online, in addition to convenience and high prices, gives another point - a low speed of recovery after a failure. If you have terabytes of data, you may be faced with the problem of downloading all the data back at once when it becomes necessary. Understand that this will already be a moment of stress for a company, where an extra day for others can cost so much money that the apparent cost of a local server will seem like a penny.
Sometimes you can level this out by separating backups thematically and storing them independently (ideally, so that each file is available independently, instead of creating disk images or archives, when you have to unpack the whole file to get a small file, I have seen such recovery tools, but unfortunately sometimes allows you to optimize the space by one and a half / two times due to compression and deduplication)
ps YOUR local server for storing backups will by definition be cheaper, more convenient, .. and you can place it in a neighboring data center and not in your back room.
By the way, in 90% of cases, for small organizations, a backup can simply be a serial recording of disks connected via usb
It's simple, every day, a specially trained person takes a couple of disks out of the safe (I would just pull the wires out of the safe and connect them one by one, let the disks physically lie in the safe), connect them to the computer and press the shortcut on the desktop, preparation incremental backup can be done in advance, at night, if desired, and online, the advantage of the method is the lowest price and the ability to spread costs over time, i.e. you simultaneously buy a maximum of 2 disks, when you run out of space, buy two more and so on. Two disks - this is to have mirroring, in order to reduce the risk of data loss due to disk failure or electronics, one could immediately store one of the disks in another building, since it is almost pointless to store backups in the same place as the data, even if you safe.
The format, depending on what kind of data you have, can be from a simple 7zip archive (file changes can be evaluated by date or file attribute - archived) to a beautiful rsync-based archiver, shadow copies and symbolic links (at one time I used the simplest bat file that created in the target directory, with the date of archiving, a complete copy of my file partitions, where a symbolic link to the previous copy was used for unchanged files, wildly convenient, the old replica could be deleted simply by deleting the directory, and restoration was a normal copy, plus you can go through the directories and take any file, not only the latest version, but also by the date of archiving).

Answer 3

In 2 different clouds. For reliability.
Depending on what kind of data, it may not be more convenient than on your own server. Or more convenient. (I mean: speed, price)

Answer 4

AWS and Azure offer interesting options. The rest is from the evil one)
And yes, it’s worth doing dumps in the cloud, but not only in order not to buy a server

Answer 5

If with encryption that you do yourself - well, then you just need to take into account that they recently signed a law on security from Runet :) It may happen that bang, bang - and you don’t have backups :)
If without encryption or "encryption from the provider" - Well, you can too. Your documents and drawings may seem interesting to the hoster and everyone interested... ":)

Answer 6

Don't forget to consider renting a non-cloud server. The cloud is not the only way to "not buy a server" (if we are talking about a local server). It is the cloud that is good, by and large, only the ability to pay only for what you really use.

Answer 7

The guide suggests doing a backup to the cloud, in order not to buy a server for backups.

The first does not exclude the second. There is a golden 3-2-1 backup rule:
You can simplify this rule to "2 + 1", that is, two copies locally and one remotely.