Preservation
Two risks, not two options
A local backup protects against failure and error: a dead disk, an overwritten file, a mistake. It’s fast to restore, free to use, and covers frequent incidents.
A remote backup protects against disaster and theft. It’s slow to restore, paid by volume, and covers rare but total incidents.
They aren’t substitutes: they cover different columns of the risk table. Picking one leaves the other column empty.
What local does better
- Restoring. Recovering 800 GB from a nearby drive takes an hour; from remote storage, often a day and sometimes an egress bill.
- Cost per volume. An 8 TB disk is bought once. The same volume remotely is paid monthly, indefinitely.
- Privacy by default. Nothing leaves your walls, no terms of service to re-read.
What remote does better
- Surviving your premises. That’s its only real purpose, and it’s enough.
- Requiring nothing from you. An automatic upload happens; a drive rotation gets forgotten on the first trip away.
- Versioning. A propagated deletion stays recoverable if the provider retains versions.
The split that avoids paying twice
Not everything needs to go remote. A simple triage cuts the bill without weakening protection:
- Remote: original capture files and deliverables. Irreplaceable.
- Local only: previews, caches, regenerable derivatives, intermediate exports. Reproducible at will.
- Remote, top priority: your catalog and metadata. Smallest volume, costliest loss — often a few hundred megabytes representing years of work.
That last point is the most commonly overlooked, and it offers the best ratio of cost to protection.
In practice
- Keep both: local to restore fast, remote to survive.
- Send only the irreplaceable off-site.
- Treat the catalog and metadata as priority, ahead of the images.
- Enable versioning on the remote side.
- Measure your real restore time before you need it.
Obscura Flow handles both destinations from the same workflow — local folder or NAS on one side, S3, Backblaze B2, or Cloudflare R2 on the other — with resumable uploads and integrity verification after transfer.