Pros and Cons of Using the Cloud or a USB Memory for Backups

Pros and Cons of Using the Cloud or a USB Memory for Backups

The current storage spaces in the cloud that we can use today have become an excellent alternative. These replace the usual CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, USB sticks , etc.

For those of you who do not know, we are talking about platforms that offer us a storage space on their servers for our data. These services today are offered by a multitude of large technology companies for their clients . And we talk about companies such as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon among many others.

As many of you probably already know, we find both free and paid cloud storage modalities. In fact, the same company usually offers us a free offer that can be extended to another more powerful payment, or with more storage space. Thanks to the usefulness of all this, millions of users already dispense with other storage elements such as USB memories or DVDs .

These spaces on remote servers can be used both sporadically and constantly, for example to save backup copies in Windows. However, not all are advantages in this sense, as we will see below.

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The security and privacy of the cloud

One of the technology-related issues that most concern people today is everything related to privacy and security. In the case that concerns us now, we must bear in mind that we are saving our backup copies on remote servers. Although these platforms offer us certain guarantees regarding third-party access to our data, many users do not trust them.

It is precisely for all this reason that they prefer to use conventional local storage methods for their backups .

The backup creation time

To all this we must add that to save these backups remotely, we need an Internet connection. This is something totally mandatory, and also depending on the connection we have, the saving time of the backup will vary ostensibly.

In fact, in most cases, saving these large amounts of information will be much slower than if we do it locally, for example on a USB memory stick or external hard drive.

Access from any PC in the world

But of course, if we store our personal backups in a local storage system, we are obliged to carry it with us if we need it. This means that if we work on several computers, we will have to use that hard drive or USB memory to recover the backup created previously.

On the contrary, if we have used a cloud storage service, we save all this and the risks that it entails. As the backup is saved on a remote server, we can access it from any PC in the world. Of course, initially access to our personal storage space is protected. Generally, to access it, we need credentials, in addition to the encryption systems that the platform as such uses for greater security.