“By now, you know the basic arguments in the on-site versus off-site storage debate,” FindTheBest‘s Ben Taylor writes for PCWorld. “External hard drives are fast (everything backed up in minutes!) and safe from hackers (you control the data), but are susceptible to theft, fire, and hard drive failure. Meanwhile, cloud solutions provide ongoing, reliable service, but are slower than on-site solutions, and (theoretically) more vulnerable to hackers.”
“But for today, let’s put aside the usual arguments and focus strictly on cost,” Taylor writes. “Assuming your data will not be hacked, stolen, or burnt to a crisp in a house fire, which solution — cloud storage or an external hard drive — is more cost effective, byte for byte?”
“At FindTheBest, we compiled data on more than 400 external hard drives, including brands like Seagate, LaCie, and Western Digital, as well as more than 80 online backup services, including familiar names like DropBox and Box, as well as smaller companies like BackBlaze and Crashplan,” Taylor writes. “Our first observation: External hard drives have a much more linear pricing structure than cloud services.”
Read more in the full article here.
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