Well what people have been recommending in this thread is to keep one copy on-site and one off-site. Backing up to the cloud is by definition off-site. So really it isn’t necessarily a matter of either one or the other. Besides, a lot of people get lazy, and so actually backing up to a portable drive and always carrying that with you to some off-site location often doesn’t happen.
Secondly, at least in my case, I have waaaay more “data” on other drives than on my system drive. Like, it’s not even close. Once I’m done adding up all the sample and effects libraries in addition to just project data it’s far more.
Lastly, I just tried Backblaze and it took me roughly 3.5 days (not including nights) to backup my system drive plus my primary work drive. That’s about 350GB of data in total. And that’s with a fairly new work drive which means I don’t have a lot of stuff on it yet. But the thing is that good backup software backs up incrementally, it doesn’t do full backups every time. So last night when I did a new backup to the cloud it took me less than an hour and a half (because I went exercising and it was done when I got back). That’s absolutely manageable.
I think I’ve restored my C drive like once or twice, plus a test.
The thing is that the cloud backup is in addition to the one on your drive. So it’s easy and fast to restore from a drive and really using the cloud is just for when the crap really hits the fan and you lose the data on your on-site physical drive as well as the primary system drive. That’s when could makes sense.
And at least download speeds tend to be faster than uploads.