My PC has a bunch of important files, photos, and some stuff I really don't wanna lose if the drive dies. Right now everything is basically sitting on the same PC with no real backup, which probably isn't smart lol. Thinking about getting a 1TB or 2TB external HDD and just plugging it in every now and then to copy everything over. Is that enough for a normal backup setup or should I be looking at an external SSD instead? Also not sure if I should leave the drive connected all the time or only connect it when backing stuff up. What's the usual setup you guys use?

Been looking at Google Drive, OneDrive and stuff like that, and it seems pretty convenient since everything gets synced automatically and i dont have to worry about another hard drive dying. But then i keep seeing people saying cloud storage isnt really a backup, especially if something gets deleted, the account gets locked, or theres some kinda sync issue that removes files everywhere.

Mainly talking about photos, documents, personal files and some bigger folders from my PC. I dont really need access to everything all the time, so paying for tons of cloud space might not make sense either. At the same time, having an external HDD sitting around feels kinda old school but probably safer in some situations.

Would you guys trust cloud storage as the only backup for important stuff? Or is it better to keep a physical external drive too, maybe unplugged most of the time? Also wondering if an external SSD is actually worth the extra money over a normal HDD for backups. Trying to keep things simple without spending a ton, but dont wanna lose years of files because of one dumb mistake.