Best Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery

Sync mirrors changes live, so a deletion or corruption propagates to every device immediately — which makes it useless as a backup. Backup takes periodic or continuous snapshots into a separate, versioned store that keeps prior versions. Most people need both: sync for convenience, backup for safety.

At least daily for most data, and continuously for anything you cannot recreate. The 3-2-1 approach is still sound: three copies, on two types of media, with one offsite. The most important number is not the frequency but the time you could tolerate losing, which sets how often you actually need to back up.

An immutable backup cannot be altered or deleted for a defined retention period, including by an administrator with full credentials. It is the single most effective defence against ransomware, because the attacker cannot encrypt or delete the copies. Veeam, Zerto, AWS S3 Object Lock and similar products all offer this in some form.

Expect to pay for stored data plus the compute to process it. For a small business backing up a few hundred gigabytes, $20 to $80 a month is realistic. The cost driver is retention: keeping many versions multiplies storage linearly, so tiering old backups to cold storage and keeping hot data short-retention is the standard way to control the bill.