OneDrive or External HDD for backup?

I'm trying to keep subscription costs and/or hardware costs down, so I would like to find a backup strategy that doesn't involve both, or at least doesn't cost too much.

I would like to do daily / weekly incremental backups, and image my drive once a month or so. From what I've read, OneDrive doesn't do incremental backups (only differential). Macrium Reflect does incremental backups (but on the paid version only).

With Office 365 Personal, MS offers 1 TB of free OneDrive storage, which is about all I'd need for personal files. If I eventually get into video editing, I'd have to break down and get a HDD enclosure and spinning disks. But right now my data storage needs are very modest. As for restoration, if I had, say 300 GB of data to restore, however, that would take a long time to download from the cloud. So maybe get the HDD enclosure and disks now? I dunno.

I guess I don't know enough about the advantages / disadvantages of cloud and/or local HDD backups to decide.

HDD enclosure is a great investment since it doesn't require a subscription fee (unless you use a paid backup plan). Personally, I use OneDrive for office (word, excel, etc) file storage and a 2tb NAS (considering an upgrade next year) for bigger files (such as FLACs and some video editing stuff). Of course, everyone has different needs, but it works well for me and I thought I'd throw my suggestion into the pool.

Madrona said:

Macrium Reflect does incremental backups (but on the paid version only)...

True, but Reflect Free does do differential backups. A Differential is all the changes since the Full, so the first differential you make would be the same size as the first incremental. Subsequent differentials would be larger than subsequent incrementals of course, but as you only need a Full and one Differential for a restore you could delete the older differentials if space was a consideration. To restore an incremental backup you need the Full and all subsequent Incrementals.

Macrium also do regular discount offers, usually 20% off, but for Black Friday it's normally 50%.

Bree said:

True, but Reflect Free does do differential backups. A Differential is all the changes since the Full, so the first differential you make would be the same size as the first incremental. Subsequent differentials would be larger than subsequent incrementals of course, but as you only need a Full and one Differential for a restore you could delete the older differentials if space was a consideration. To restore an incremental backup you need the Full and all subsequent Incrementals.

Macrium also do regular discount offers, usually 20% off, but for Black Friday it's normally 50%.

So if I have this right, a differential backup is larger than an incremental on the second backup because it makes a copy of the first differential backup as well as any current file changes?

idgat said:

External drive, absolutely. OneDrive (and similar "cloud" storage) shoud not be used as backups. Ideally suited for sharing/accessing files between devices.

Backup options - depends on what you want. If you want to be able to access backup files in "native/natural" format, then imaging software is not appropriate. Use SyncbackFree.

What does "access files in native/natural format" mean?

Samuria said:

Videos and photos you can store unlimited with Google backup and sync and its FREE

You only get 15 GB for free...