I personally avoid cloud-based solutions myself.

Spinning rust still has great value, often in storage capacities well beyond what SSD offers. With a docking bay it is very easy to keep multiple backups, and/or multiple backups on the same disk.

Last used tape in the mid-1990s.

My primary [C:\] drive is a SSD but I'm with Tangor, next renovation will be a plain vanilla Seagate SATA drive.

Unfortunately you can no longer buy small drives so you're stuck with a drive only using a fraction of the space, I try to use my C:\ drive for Windows OS only.

Program files, program data, User folder all reside [where possible] on my D:\ drive. There are also E:, F:, G:.... drives Z: is allocated to optical drive.

Speed? Each morning I get up push start button on desktop, then the TV, then to bathroom followed by kitchen for coffee...

By which time I just enter PIN number. Who needs speed?

Speed? Each morning I get up push start button on desktop, then the TV, then to bathroom followed by kitchen for coffee...

Well, that's another topic entirely.

I've been experimenting with cloud storage for non-critical and non-confidential files. Not backups. For me there's a major trust issue ive always struggled with, and I've yet to be convinced.
What I am convinced about is the convenience of cloud.

When you think about websites, in the vast majority of cases it's handled by a third party, on servers out of our control. We're all generally happy with that.
Backup are still important, whatever you choose.

I do have NAS raid for local backups, and that works fine. I've automated the backup and testing for convenience. The laptop SSD is backed up to the NAS.

It's hard drives for the most part, and for longer term archiving I use DVDs, some going back many, many years.

I, too, used DVD for back up. In fact, on the shelf above my computer sits 12 50-dvd capacity plastic containers. (sigh) About half are CD-RW, which is still a pretty large number. Got tried of the shuffling about. Fortunately I do have a database of each optical disc so I CAN find something if I need to... which is the reason why they are still sitting on my computer desk.

Started using removable hard drives for the same purpose years ago. That stack of 7-3.5" drives occupy a MUCH smaller footprint on the shelf (and I can afford to have a duplicate set of the same backups on 7 drives that are kept off premises in case of disaster.

I've been doing months of research data resilience strategies, not necessarily through my work, but for our family photographs, which I want to preserve for my children and any children they have, etc etc. One thing I've learned, somewhat soberingly, is that even in 2020, the most resilient form of data is ink and paper. No joke by the way.

I have 3 locations with pfSense routers, my home, our family compound 30 kilometres away, and our head office in Bangkok, around 1000 kilometres away. This enables me to deploy 2 backup locations, each with a small RAID 1 to receive backups. If I wanted to span the backups across continents, I'd need to go cloud, and for the same reasons as engine, I'm not willing to do that, even with encryption.

I haven't done the maths, but if you can reliably get a couple of hundred K of data on a page of A4, that's going to be a lot of paper. The Long Now Foundation did some research into data resilience, and concluded if I remember correctly that slabs of carbon with the data physically etched onto those, should last many ages into the future.

For us mortals, it's paper and a good, well executed backup regime. Paper will last through EMP events, if your Faraday Cage is proved to be ineffective.

engine: What's the solution for making the data on the SSD safe? Backup, for sure, but...

I use SD and hard disks in a quite practical way. My backup software of choice is EaseUS Backup Free (an specific version for personal choice). It can backup everything the day and hours I set it to, even wake the laptop in the middle of the night and perform a full, partial or incremental backup without my intervention, or do so when I choose to.

My laptop has an SD card slot. For some time I used it to backup my HD, it's practical, convenient and fast. You can get quite large SD cards for cheap but depending your work, space might end up becoming an issue for stuff 128G/256G+

I built a HDD caddy (you can also buy them for cheap), this way I could perform FAST backups SSD to HDD with just a click without plugging USB devices. This-is-fast. Depending on your hardware you might find USB3+ faster, but as said depends on your hardware. I could also swap the caddy and insert my DVD drive, restart is recommended.

Also have a router with USB, it's quite easy to perform backups within my network to any USB external media. It's not my favorite because of the lower speed compared to HDD in caddy or USB, and I don't fancy the concept of data permanently connected to the network. But yes, it is a practical option, if WIFI is too slow I just plug the Ethernet cable.

My personal choice and ritual at present time is using two external hard disks, simple USB interface, fast, incremental.

engine: I use DVDs, some going back many, many years.

tangor: In fact, on the shelf above my computer sits 12 50-dvd capacity plastic

I used to do that, I don't anymore. Optical drives can fail even if you don't touch or use them at all, the brand might be a factor yes, but overall optical drives are subject to fungus damage, careful with the topic, it's an easy read and also easy to underestimate, in fact that's the usual "oh no that's not a problem here, I store my discs in...". Truth is you don't need to SEE evident damage, spots or stains on the optical drives to suffer data loss. Experienced this myself and on diff workplaces. The data loss experienced covered 5+ years old discs, on some cases less (due to the environment).

Backups can often be "static", meaning people perform the backup and assume it's safe, but won't test periodically the target data. Any backup is safe as long as you can actually recover all the data.

Heh, @explorador ... the "stain/interference" aspect on optical is true ... but after some 20+years I have one yet to fail, even in a Texas hot humid mold infested environment due to "fungus". besides, a wipe removes that. HOWEVER, SCRATCHED optical is a completely different problem!

Heh! Heh! Optical Drives?

Years, decades ago ? Those olden days I could have made a fortune rejuvenating CD players, then later DVD players. the most common problem was the laser lens being slowly covered by cigarette smoke.

A cotton bud dipped in isotropic alcohol fixed that. Seeing we were all old pensioners/retirees I only charged one or two packs of Marlboro for repairs, longer jobs a cask of nice wine - them were the good old days.

Later [years] on we found that was no longer working. Why? The laser lens had became cheaper, and cheaper plastic rubbish which "crazed" over with the passage of time.

Now? People fix nothing. Most appliances I see thrown out are perfectly serviceable.

Mould? Not in my idyllic neck of the woods with a temperate climate and almost adjacent to the ocean. Well 2 minutes as the crow flies, 10 mins by car.

Good for you both, I just wouldn't trust sensitive data (again) to the media considered by many, over and over, the most delicate medium, and actually a step back in storage. It's good, I used it, but I don't anymore. Besides the risks: the speed, practicality, capacity and price makes HDDs quite unbeatable.

Original testing of optical (CD/DVD) indicates a thousand years stability ... however that can only be obtained if good care and storage of media is adhered.

HDD comes in at a far lower number.

SSD is lower than HDD.

Tape is the most ephemeral of all.

I use what is FAST, CONVENIENT, AND AFFORDABLE. :)

These days that's HDD and SSD. But I STILL have all my optical stuff, and somewhere in a non-magnetic box is a boat load of tape.

That said, I got rid of the floppies in various formats (8" and smaller) by transferring that data to "the next big thing" simply because you couldn't repair/replace those drives!

$80.00 for 4 terabyte HDD is dang reasonable, and "docking stations" (USB) for $25 makes perfect sense.

$80.00 for 4 terabyte HDD

I wish...

Down here in beautiful Oz you're looking at around $A145 each which is roughly $US 102 at the moment, and I could really use four of them for my new caddy.

Sadly the real halcyon salad days of AdSense are long gone and there are limits to one's pension..

You'd think since you are closer to the source than the US is you'd get a price break. Whodathunk?

I was a bit disappointed in current pricing for Federation issue six zettabyte portable drives to upgrade my tricorder ...

Sadly HGST has been acquired by WD, however I bought a whack of their 8TB HUH728080ALE600 7.2K RPM SATA drives in 2017 when I switched to AMD Epyc Naples CPUs for my servers.

Yes, I will likely switch to SSD if, as I expect, I upgrade to the Epyc Genoa (4th gen) in 2021/22. I’m still not settled on a brand or model...

Speed is important but reliability is critical.

That said my backup methodology remains as per this 2017 thread [webmasterworld.com].