Power & Protection
Cloud vs Local Backup for a Gaming PC
Local restores fast and burns in the same house fire. Cloud survives the room and restores slowly. The honest answer is which one you do first, not which one wins.
Before you buy anythingThis page also considers Doing local first, cloud later, Cloud sync version history and Backing up less. Why, and when each is the better answer.
Contents
Set up local first, then add cloud if the data justifies it. Local is a one-off cost that restores quickly and covers the failures that actually happen most. Cloud covers the rarer event that takes the whole room — and it restores at the speed of your connection, which is the number people never check.
A note on this comparison: this rests on how each approach fails and what each costs to restore from, not on services tested here. See how we test.
The short version
Local. A drive, or a NAS, in your house. Cheap after the purchase, fast to write, fast to restore. Shares every risk that affects the building.
Cloud. Storage somewhere else, paid monthly. Survives fire, theft and flood, and restores at whatever speed your line manages. Ongoing cost for as long as you want the copy.
What actually separates them
| Criterion | Local (our pick) | Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Choose this if | You want cheap capacity and fast restores, on site | You need the copy to survive fire, theft or flood |
| Cost shape | One-off purchase | Recurring, indefinitely |
| Restore speed | Fast — limited by the drive | Limited by your connection |
| Survives fire or theft | No | Yes |
| Survives ransomware | Only if disconnected | Only with version history |
| Effort to start | An evening | An evening, then a long first upload |
| Ongoing attention | Remembering to connect it | Almost none |
| Privacy exposure | None | Depends on client-side encryption |
They fail in different directions, which is why the answer is both
Local fails to the events that take a room. Every copy in the house shares a fire, a burglary, a burst pipe and a lightning strike.
Cloud fails to time and bandwidth. The data is safe and getting it back is a project — hundreds of gigabytes over a domestic connection is days, not an afternoon.
Neither is a flaw to be argued away. That is why the long-standing rule is three copies, two kinds of storage, one elsewhere, as set out in RAID is not a backup — the "one elsewhere" is doing the cloud's job and the other two are doing local's.
The restore-speed number is the one nobody checks
It is easy to evaluate cloud storage on price per terabyte and never on the figure that matters when you need it.
Work it out once: the amount you would need back, divided by your actual download speed. If the answer is a week, cloud is your insurance policy rather than your recovery plan, and a local copy is what gets you working again on the day.
Sync with version history is doing half the job
Plain synchronisation is not backup — it propagates deletions and encrypted files exactly as designed.
What rescues people is the version history behind it, and that has a retention window. So the question to ask a provider is not how much space you get but how far back you can go, and whether you have ever retrieved anything from it.
Back up less and both get cheaper
Most of what fills a gaming PC is redownloadable. Game installs are the bulk and they are the least worth protecting.
Saves, configurations, recordings, screenshots, documents and photographs are the parts with no other copy — and separating them usually shrinks the problem by an order of magnitude, which is the point backing up more than game saves makes at length.
The local copy has to be disconnected to count
A permanently mounted external drive is reachable by anything that can reach the original, so it defends against a drive dying and very little else.
Connect it, write to it, disconnect it. That is what makes it a different copy rather than a second location for the same risk.
The decision, plainly
- No backup at all yet → local, this week
- Local working, data you could not replace → add cloud
- Irreplaceable photographs and documents → cloud, without question
- A large game library → do not back it up; redownload it
- Slow connection → local is the recovery plan, cloud is the insurance
- Sensitive material → cloud with client-side encryption, or local only
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An external drive is the cheapest genuine backup, and the disconnection is the feature rather than the inconvenience.
Backup external hard drive
Connect, write, disconnect. A drive that lives plugged in is a second copy of the same risk.
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A fast external SSD suits anyone whose backup gets skipped because it is slow, which is the real reason most backups stop happening.
External NVMe SSD
Speed matters behaviourally — a backup that takes minutes gets done, one that takes hours does not.
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A NAS suits several machines and a household copy, and it is the thing being backed up rather than the backup itself.
Two-bay NAS enclosure
Redundancy is uptime, not backup. It needs its own copy, and its own shutdown protection.
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A UPS belongs alongside either, because it reduces the bad shutdown that corrupts things in the first place — the NAS-specific version is in battery backup for a NAS.
UPS battery backup unit
Protects against a bad write during an outage. It stores nothing and replaces neither option here.
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The mistake to avoid
Choosing between them. They cover different failures, and picking one on price means accepting the other's failure mode without having decided to. If only one is realistic, make it local — it handles the common cases — and treat cloud as the thing to add when the irreplaceable pile grows.
The second mistake is measuring cloud storage on capacity and never on restore time. The moment you need it is the moment you discover how long a full recovery takes, and finding that out in advance costs one division and changes what you buy.
If this is not right for you
- Doing local first, cloud later
- The realistic sequence for most people: local is cheap, fast to set up and covers the common failures, and cloud can be added to it rather than instead of it.
- Cloud sync version history
- If you already pay for storage with version history, some of the backup job may already be done — the question is retention depth and whether you have tested a restore.
- Backing up less
- Most of what fills a gaming PC is redownloadable. Separating the irreplaceable from the merely inconvenient shrinks the problem enough that both options get cheaper.
Questions people actually ask
Which should I set up first?
How long does a cloud restore actually take?
Is cloud storage safe from ransomware?
What about privacy?
Do I need to back up my games?
How do I know either one works?
Question this page did not answer? Ask it.