External hard drive or cloud backup: which is better?
The short answer
Ideally both. An external drive restores fast and you pay for it once. A cloud backup is off-site and keeps versions. It survives fire, theft and ransomware. If you can pick only one, pick the cloud. Whatever damages your computer often damages a drive kept next to it too.
In detail
An external drive is fast and affordable. Restoring a terabyte over USB takes an hour instead of days. There is no subscription. Tools like File History or Time Machine make it automatic while you work at your desk. Its limit is location. The drive sits next to the computer it protects. A fire, flood or burglary can take out both at once. So can a power surge or ransomware that encrypts every connected drive. Drives also age quietly, even unused in a drawer.
Cloud backup works the other way round. The first upload is slow and there is a yearly fee. In return your data sits in a professional data center in another city. Version history lets you roll back to before a ransomware attack. That is exactly where a local drive helps least.
Using both is the textbook 3-2-1 rule, and it costs less than people expect. A $60 external drive handles fast local restores. Backblaze or IDrive holds the off-site copy. After one evening of setup, every common disaster has a working answer. That runs from a slip of the finger to a house fire.
Online backup vs an external hard drive is really a question of money over time. The drive is a single purchase of roughly $60 as a guide price. Online backup is a yearly bill. Backblaze costs $99 a year. IDrive costs $83.88 in year one and $119.88 after that.
Over five years the cloud copy costs a few hundred dollars against one drive purchase. Weigh that against what it covers. Think of a replacement laptop, a photo library you cannot buy again and a ransom demand you can ignore.
One product does both from one plan. Acronis True Image writes a local disk image to your external drive and keeps a cloud copy in parallel. It costs $72.99 a year. It also blocks processes that try to touch its backup files.
Two habits keep the drive part of the setup working well. Connect it at least once a month. Backblaze drops an external drive from its backup if it stays unplugged for 30 days. Unplug it again between runs so ransomware on the computer cannot reach it.