you could just put shit you don't want to lose on an external harddrive/USB stick, pretty cheap options.

x

I already have a seperate external seagate harddrive. I'm asking about drive failures or virus wipes. Pretty inefficient to duplicate large files over

So you want redundancy against a drive completely failing but don't want to actually duplicate the files?
And how do think that's supposed to work?
Oh right "the cloud".
The larger your files are and the more files you have, the worse the cloud is for backups. Maybe the daily/weekly/monthly backups won't take too much time. But how much time would the initial backup take? Yes, you have to upload everything you want to backup. It doesn't have to be quite as extreme as it would be for me, middle of nowhere = mediocre internet (thanks telekom) + a ton of data = 3 years for the initial backup, but it could still be rather annoying. And what happens if there is a failure and you need your data back? Maybe you don't mind needing a month for the initial upload, but how will you feel about having to wait a month before you have all your data back? Some services like backblaze offer to physically ship an HDD to you, but it'll obviously cost extra.

If you have Office 365 (which comes with 1TB storage), then you can backup to OneDrive.

If you can't afford a couple of terabytes worth of external HDDs you can have multiple cloud backups in several sites at once: Drive, Dropbox, MEGA.CO, etcetera
it might not be the most effective way to keep a backup of your files but as far as free, temporary backups go that's your best bet IMO

if you're worried about having a drive fail, RAID 1

if you're worried about losing data from some kind of operation, just use Windows Backup and Restore, it's surprisingly really solid

all cloud options will probably destroy your bandwidth, and if you're trying to back up more than like 50GB it's going to cost a fortune

For the record, I use Google Drive and it is 2$ for 100 gb. Upscales to 10 bucks for a terabyte. But having multiple hard drives is good aswell. Backing up to only one place isn't really a backup so having multiple different avenues for storage is the best option.

I meant it'll cost both in service fees and in total bandwidth necessary.

If you're doing almost nothing on the internet, it isn't going to cost much, but if you're saving family photos from a decade it'll kill you in ways RAID 1 wouldn't.

x