CakeAlexSHere
Buy a Synology server with RAID 5 disks. Backup to that. Buy another Synology server for your mother or girlfriend and that's your off site backup sorted. Not only that but you will get your own personal VPN (no subscriptions, it's all built in). It is an investment but the costs is reasonable.

I'm nowhere near smart enough to implement that.  However, maybe I can pay someone to set it up for me in the future, when I'm not broke.  It's a cool idea, I like it.

^^

Understood but It's not that hard and I'm not that smart... I just follow the instructions mostly.

Here is the best generic backup advice anyone will ever give. Don't use one.
 
Instead use two. Use a backup software (acronis is my goto) to image or simply clone your system drive and (if you have a mind to configure this way) your plugin drive to external/portable drives. Then take those off site and redo the images once or twice per year. Then use a cloud based solution (Carbonite or similar) to constantly archive your data folders.

Local software based solutions are absolutely great for imaging system drives and drives that don't change much. But I've never found a local software based backup solution that could do ongoing scheduled data backups long term without regular maintenance/attention. IOW if you try to use a local software based backup solution only, it WILL fail you eventually. But if you're only doing imaging with it, there is nothing better. So image your static drives (system and plugin) once or twice a year and keep the backups at work i.e. off site.
 
Then get a cloud based account and configure it to keep constant backups of all your data folders. This combination covers all the bases and gets you as close to bulletproof as you'll ever be.

Now I realize there are still lots of people who believe a DAW machine should not be constantly connected to a network or the internet. Those people are what I like to call wrong. They used to be right. But its not 2004 anymore and things are different now.

Don't waste your money
 
Win 10 backup is great and works for me and It is only a matter of going to  files and folders and choosing backup.
I BACK UP AFTER A MAJOR UPDATE
Do not bother with online backup. get yourself a decent terrabyte usb drive  and backup and put in a draw ready for any mishaps.
I have a 2 terrabyte usb for my computers and a terrabyte drive for my whole music collection of flac files,a drive for my Genos and midi files,style etc.
A Breeze and big brother cannot watch you>
 
"what if your isp goes down you cannot jump on a cloud" "WHAT IF"!!!

igiwigi
I BACK UP AFTER A MAJOR UPDATE

Not to pick nits but most pros would probably tell you its a better idea to backup BEFORE the update.
 

Do not bother with online backup. get yourself a decent terrabyte usb drive  and backup and put in a draw ready for any mishaps.

This would be great advice if everyone in the world was like you. But alas its been my experience that most people are not like you. Most people treat manual backups the same way they treat their gym membership. They promise themselves they'll do it every week. Then it becomes every other week. Then it becomes every month or four. Next thing you know they have a major system failure and realize they haven't done any kind of backup in two years or more. Human nature thing I'm afraid. Saw it more times than I care to count when I was doing IT work.

Which is why cloud based solutions are better advice for most people. They set it and forget it and it works and it tends to keep working. Easy peasy. 
 

 
"what if your isp goes down you cannot jump on a cloud" "WHAT IF"!!!

What if your house burns down? What if? Most people have multiple ways to connect to the internet. Almost all cellphones can become a wifi hotspot these days. Most people don't have a second house with exact copies of everything that's in the first house. Just sayin' 

JohanSebatianGremlin

igiwigi
I BACK UP AFTER A MAJOR UPDATE

Not to pick nits but most pros would probably tell you its a better idea to backup BEFORE the update.

That is really good advise
 

Do not bother with online backup. get yourself a decent terrabyte usb drive  and backup and put in a draw ready for any mishaps.

This would be great advice if everyone in the world was like you. But alas its been my experience that most people are not like you.

It depends from the part of the world. More precisely from the place you are. If I decide to do online backups, that will be yearly backup. I mean it will take a year till it is complete
 
Many colleagues are using NAS based backups and are happy. Backups to shared network folders are not good these days, any cryptovirus in local network will void it (the same danger exists for USB disks backup, especially when they are permanently connected for scheduled backups). But incremental backups with specialized software on NAS, without direct access to the files, is not so bad choice.
 
I agree that backup at the same location has weak points (house is burned or raped). So periodic "backup of backup" is a good idea.
 
For small important files cloud based approach is good. But I do not believe "most people" have sufficient internet connection for "backup all" case (and who has, sometimes also has unmanageable amount of data... f.e. I still think how to backup 170TB  of garbage currently collected on my servers).

azslow3
It depends from the part of the world. More precisely from the place you are. If I decide to do online backups, that will be yearly backup. I mean it will take a year till it is complete

Good point but perhaps I should have clarified a bit. The recommendation for online backups is always (or at least should always) be predicated on the assumption that sufficient bandwidth is available.
 
Its certainly true (and I myself learned first hand the hard way) that there are still vast portions of real estate in the US that lack any kind of viable broadband option. But you tend to find that most of that real estate is what is known as 'the fly-over states'. Its called fly-over because most people don't go there but rather fly over it while going to the population centers. Which is why I used the word most instead of the word all when I said described the number of people that cloud based is good for.

And yeah, before anyone calls me out on it I realize there are people from all over the world on this forum. But its been my experience that the US is far from the only country where the population centers have multiple broadband options available and less so in the sparsely populated bad lands.

The thing that I don't like about NAS based (or any kind of local based) rolling backups is that it requires both software and hardware to remain trouble free. Either one has an issue and the backups break. And often, no one on site has any idea their backups are broken until they need to do restore and can't. Seen it many times.

With online backups, the software is simpler and there is no hardware component. Or rather the only hardware component is the internet connection. When your backup NAS down in the basement breaks, you often figure it out two years later when you need to do a restore and can't. When your internet breaks, you find out 57 milliseconds later when half the building starts yelling. Long term, cloud based is more reliable and in my experience the difference in reliability is night and day.

But cloud based should only be used for active data. If you've got 57TB of garbage, that's not active data, that's... well... garbage. If you want a backup of it, buy hard drives, make copies and store them off site because chances are 56.98TB of it hasn't changed since Truman was in office and won't change ever. Use physical media to make one or two copies of static archive data and keep them off site. Done. Use cloud based for everything new that comes in after and even a modest broadband connection will be more than sufficient. Even in the age of 24bit/96kHz audio and 4k video.
 
 And if you're living out the sticks with no broadband, then either learn to actively verify your on-site backups every month or hire someone who will do it for you.
 

I've never understood people who pooh-pooh the idea of cloud backups. The argument is usually a straw man one - "you can't rely on some other company to store your data." I don't think anyone's suggesting that cloud backups are a complete backup solution, it's supplementary to a physical backup. If you omit either physical or cloud backups, you're really leaving yourself open to catastrophe. You could have a hard drive backup in every drawer in your house and it wouldn't do you a lick of good if the house burned down. And you can use the best cloud backup system in the world but if the company goes down or something happens to their servers and all of their backups, well you're screwed there as well. Having both physical and cloud backups increases your security exponentially, much more than the sum of their parts. I guess all you have to worry about then is nuclear war, or the incredibly miniscule (almost negligible) chance that both backups will fail at the same time. 
 
Not sure I'd worry about getting my latest 10 minutes of bleepy synth based nonsense finished in the event of a nuclear war anyway. I'd be too busy puking bright yellow radiation vomit or something. 

My primary objection to Cloud backups is my 300baud internet connection.

BobF
My primary objection to Cloud backups is my 300baud internet connection.

I think that holds true for most folks. Even with 200Mb/s it would take over 11 hours to upload 1TB. For the price of such a connection you could buy a HDD drive each month. Some hosts charge for bandwidth, so a company using a cloud service would most likely pay more there unless they used incremental backups.
 
A chunk of marketing shifted to "scare tactics" in the late 80s, but a lot of the scenarios used are truly rare. One could simply encrypt an external HDD and store it semi-remotely to achieve the same thing.