Both.
Online is safe from hardware failure or even if your house burns down.
BUT
You no longer have complete control, especially streaming services.
GTA is a good example where music has been removed as licencing expires. Then Rockstar only only allowed the remaster be distributed which people say is is worse than the original.
Same for music, videos, etc. No guarantee it'll be available forever.

I have my photos and documents both in a google drive and a few different hard drives at home.
This means they are safe if my house burns down plus the convenience of having them no matter where I am.
But at the same time if I lose access to my google account for whatever reason I have a local backup.

music, movies, software I keep on multiple hard drives inside multiple PC's at home.
I figure even if 1 PC/HDD dies having 2 fail at the same time is unlikely.
and if the house burns down, I've bigger problems, then losing my original copy of GTA!

another vote for both for practical reasons stated

but you can make the following pessimistic scenarios about both

save things online - but accept it may all disappear without notice, be seen by random others - so save only things you are happy with that for. (sure, i know there is security etc, but we know it can fail)
save things on personal devices - accept the device will fail and be (somehow) hacked/stolen etc by random others - so save only things you are happy with that for

So, the best bet for things very valuable to you is both, and more than one of each - eg two online places and 2+ hardware things

and if something is security risk (eg all bank details or scans of your passes for swiss gold deposits! 😀 ) then use whatever highly rated encryptions you can

chinny22 wrote on 2024-12-05, 01:22:

Both. Online is safe from hardware failure or even if your house burns down. BUT You no longer have complete control, especially […]
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Both.
Online is safe from hardware failure or even if your house burns down.
BUT
You no longer have complete control, especially streaming services.
GTA is a good example where music has been removed as licencing expires. Then Rockstar only only allowed the remaster be distributed which people say is is worse than the original.
Same for music, videos, etc. No guarantee it'll be available forever.

I have my photos and documents both in a google drive and a few different hard drives at home.
This means they are safe if my house burns down plus the convenience of having them no matter where I am.
But at the same time if I lose access to my google account for whatever reason I have a local backup.

music, movies, software I keep on multiple hard drives inside multiple PC's at home.
I figure even if 1 PC/HDD dies having 2 fail at the same time is unlikely.
and if the house burns down, I've bigger problems, then losing my original copy of GTA!

gerry wrote on 2024-12-05, 09:13:

another vote for both for practical reasons stated […]
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another vote for both for practical reasons stated

but you can make the following pessimistic scenarios about both

save things online - but accept it may all disappear without notice, be seen by random others - so save only things you are happy with that for. (sure, i know there is security etc, but we know it can fail)
save things on personal devices - accept the device will fail and be (somehow) hacked/stolen etc by random others - so save only things you are happy with that for

So, the best bet for things very valuable to you is both, and more than one of each - eg two online places and 2+ hardware things

I fear a problem of synchronisation, having something online and not having it offline. Then I would have the issue of what to "add" even if I find an auto-sync app, or what not to "add".
(there is also the chance I forget to maintain it at one end myself if things get automatic)

gerry wrote on 2024-12-05, 09:13:

and if something is security risk (eg all bank details or scans of your passes for swiss gold deposits! 😀 ) then use whatever highly rated encryptions you can

Good reminder I had to get rid of those "bank information" people sent over communication apps for payments 😉

Just my two cents....so take it for what it's worth.
Personally I would not use cloud backups for anything. It is not secure. It never will be secure. It could be gone tomorrow without warning.
I used to store everything on DVD - two copies of each one. I slowly started migrating to external drives, then slowly cut it down to one disk of each.
I have multiple copies of everything - two on magnetic drives and two on SSDs.
I put a text file in folders that tells the number of files and number of bytes - in case something accidentally gets deleted.
I even maintain drives that contain zipped folders where each folder represents one of the original DVDs
A lot of work? Yes. Overkill? Yes. OCD? Absolutely (LOL)

yep yep all important files get saved multiple times, preferably on different media. I haven't had a serious data loss since 2009, when my unbacked-up RAID array failed. That's never happening again.

I use a networked file server. Keeping a server is good for convenience and keeping your data in sync. No matter which system you're using, you're accessing the same data file so nothing goes out of sync.

I retain a lot of video files, so the size of data requires multiple hard drives. It's a lot of data that I wouldn't want to lose, but if I did it wouldn't be the end of the world. So I use SnapRAID.
SnapRAID doesn't use as much space as a full 1:1 backup copy but it does provide parity protection, so it can handle random hard drive failures. I like SnapRAID much better than traditional RAID-5/6 because it's more flexible about mixing drives, and doesn't require all the drives to constantly be spinning. When you build a server for home use, it will spend most of it's time idle so power management is very relevant. Most of the time it only has 0-1 hard drive spinning and the others have spun down due to inactivity. The OS runs from an SSD.

For files that are more critical (and not as huge) I can make full backups. I'd like to send those backups to a separate system, or even the internet, but I haven't automated that.
On a couple occasions when forest fires were looming I made sure to copy important files to a laptop and also uploaded a large encrypted .7z file to the internet. But I don't maintain that on a regular schedule.