Larry Selzer over at Byte (which can be found on Informationweek.com now) has a commentary wherein he describes the differences and similarities between online backup and cloud storage. Online backup, which tends to be cheaper than Cloud Storage services, as the name suggests, allows backup and restore of your files:
As a general rule, online backup services allow you to back up and restore files. That's it. With hard drive sizes well into the hundreds of gigabytes, this necessarily means that you're only backing up a portion of your system, so many of these services default to backing up your My Documents and other data folders.
Source: Larry Selzer
By contrast, cloud storage generally allows for some sort of constant syncing between your computer and the online service:
Cloud storage is different. These services take a portion of your hard drive and synchronize it with the online storage. Make changes on the hard disk and they are quickly replicated to the cloud storage. If you have other systems on the account, the files are synchronized down to them. And so as you work on your files they are automatically backed up.
Source: Larry Selzer
Either way, the article concludes with the sentiment that paying for some sort of off-site backup storage is the sign of a smart user. Most NAS devices, such as those from Synology and QNAP allow for automated integration of off-site storage, so if you have such a NAS you get the best of both worlds - fast and large local storage, and robust off-site file protection.
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