These are the most common, but new ‘Cloud Companies’ pop up daily, with varying degrees of reliability and ‘staying power’. Arranging cloud backups should be relegated to a Managed IT Services company or even an independent IT services ‘Guy’. 

1. Cloud Storage: AWS and Azure. These are typically very expensive, and they charge not only to upload but also to download. (called Egress charges). You will often pay double only if you are aware of it once recovery is needed. It will be a shock, but if you need it, you will pay anything to keep your business alive, so you will end needlessly losing a lot of money. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 offer a certain amount of cloud storage included in the product level of your monthly subscription.
2. Cloud Backup Software: Carbonite, ibackup, idrive, Crashplan, etc. These are usually cheap, and in the Cloud, many think it’s the right way. But they are file backups, and that presents unforeseen problems when you need them the most:
   1. To retrieve the data, you need the proper hardware. The majority of small businesses do not have the necessary hardware (servers mainly) that are immediately accessible for retrieval, so typically, a 3rd Party IT service is used.
   2. Those IT consulting services would require you to send an external drive to copy the data. If you’re lucky, this process might take somewhere between 7-14 days. Again, can your company survive 14 days without your data? How much business do you stand to lose?
3. NO Cloud Backup: This will not protect against issues with your local backup (data can get corrupted, or hardware can fail on the backup server, etc..) and will not protect against Ransomware or natural catastrophe. This is not an option at all, but a lack of options – it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
4. External Drive: Backing up your data onto a drive, then physically taking the drive offsite: In theory, this could work, but there are several issues here:
   1. It is tedious, requiring a lot of manual work. Someone needs to plug in, copy, plug out, remove, move it somewhere, rinse and repeat – human error is the #1 cause for any errors/issues that IT services firms face, and this method screams human error. If cloud backups were automobiles, this would be a horse and buggy.
   2. Usually, the staff that deals with this task (maybe the owner or another trusted party) are not IT support professionals and thus do not have the proper skills and tools to transfer the external drives properly – they usually just put it in the car as they drive and those road bumps shaking the external drive will eventually break it. At least put it on the seat and not in the trunk.
   3. Often the storage place would be geographically close – someone’s home, most likely, and if the office gets hit with a natural disaster, the house with the offsite copy may get hit as well.
   4. Will recovery be reliable? This is the most important factor. You backup and backup, but if the retrieval process is also not routinely tested, no one verifies the backup integrity, leaving it to chance whether it will work or not when needed.