Half of my family will not pay for cloud services, so they end up trying to do their own thing without the technical acumen to really do it right. I try to point them in the right direction, but they don't always listen, I'm not always around, and money is a constraint. Here are some examples of what I've seen as just one person seeing family and friends, not dealing with the entire user base of large company.
A friend thought his external drive was his backup, so he'd copy all his data there, then delete the originals on his computer/phone. The net result, only one copy of his data existed on an old 3.5" external HDD which regularly seemed to make its way into backpacks and all over the place. I tried to explain multiple times that it failed to be a backup when the file was only on the external drive, but I'm not sure it ever clicked.
My sister had her photo library on an external drive because it was too large for her internal drive. Again, no backup. To add to that, because USB 2.0 (the drive's speed) was so slow and her library was so big, it would take forever to load. I told her to leave it while we had dinner, because she thought the drive was dead and near tears. It eventually came up, but every operation was slow, so as she tried to use it during a high stress time (gather pictures together for a funeral), it did not go well. Meanwhile, I had iCloud Photos with facial recognition turned on and was able to gather all the pictures I had going back 20 years in under 30 seconds and send them off.
My sister also called me crying when her phone stopped charging, because she thought she was going to lose all the recent pictures she took of her kid that hadn't been copied to the external drive yet. Before she could get the words out of what was wrong, I thought one of my parents had died, I was bracing for the worst. Actually, the first thing she was able to get out was "nobody died", she knew exactly how it sounded. $1-3/month would have saved me from that call, which I would gladly pay to never get a call like that again.
I convinced my mom to setup Time Machine as a backup, so at least she'd have something. However, she had a laptop, so she'd regularly unplug the drive. She'd occasionally plug it in when she remembered, but would go months between backups. The longer she waited, the longer it took when she did it, and the less likely she was to do it. Eventually the drive died and when she finally told me about it and I took a look, she hadn't backed up in over 2 years and even that 2 year old backup was on a dead drive. I've actually seen patterns like this with a lot of people. When the external drive can't be plugged in all the time, backups become very irregular and infrequent.
My dad is ultra paranoid about backups and spent his whole career in tech. At one point be bought 2 of the same computers, so if something happened to one he had an identical backup. He had backup software running on his main PC, then would occasionally clone that drive to store it off-site. When he had an issue with the backup software, tech support told him to wipe out his backup and start it again. He told the tech he was nervous about this, because if his main hard drive failed during that initial backup, he'd lose everything. The tech said that was very unlikely... well, it happened. He deleted the backup, and then right after that the main hard drive failed. He was lucky he had the 2nd off-site copy and it was only 2 weeks old. He was able to load that onto the backup PC. Had he been anyone else in this story, or even the person in the article, he would have lost it all.
While having a cloud-only backup is a risk, a cloud backup does offer a more up-to-date backup, even for a laptop, than most will have with a local drive. It protects against local hardware failing. It also protects against fire and theft. I don't think dismissing the idea all together is great. It also solves the storage issue, where someone can have access to a full large library of photos without having to have a disk large enough to have them all locally. This can save a ton of money, when the alternative is needing to get a massive amount of storage on every device (computer and phone). It also solves the issue of running out of space all the time.
For the average user, a cloud backup from a reputable company that won't abandon the user base without warning, is a lot better than anything they'd otherwise do, even if it's not perfect on it's own. Most users are not willing or able to play sys admin in their free time, and it's always a balance between time, money, skill, convenience, paranoia, and consistency.
Half of my family will not pay for cloud services, so they end up trying to do their own thing without the technical acumen to really do it right. I try to point them in the right direction, but they don't always listen, I'm not always around, and money is a constraint. Here are some examples of what I've seen as just one person seeing family and friends, not dealing with the entire user base of large company.
A friend thought his external drive was his backup, so he'd copy all his data there, then delete the originals on his computer/phone. The net result, only one copy of his data existed on an old 3.5" external HDD which regularly seemed to make its way into backpacks and all over the place. I tried to explain multiple times that it failed to be a backup when the file was only on the external drive, but I'm not sure it ever clicked.
My sister had her photo library on an external drive because it was too large for her internal drive. Again, no backup. To add to that, because USB 2.0 (the drive's speed) was so slow and her library was so big, it would take forever to load. I told her to leave it while we had dinner, because she thought the drive was dead and near tears. It eventually came up, but every operation was slow, so as she tried to use it during a high stress time (gather pictures together for a funeral), it did not go well. Meanwhile, I had iCloud Photos with facial recognition turned on and was able to gather all the pictures I had going back 20 years in under 30 seconds and send them off.
My sister also called me crying when her phone stopped charging, because she thought she was going to lose all the recent pictures she took of her kid that hadn't been copied to the external drive yet. Before she could get the words out of what was wrong, I thought one of my parents had died, I was bracing for the worst. Actually, the first thing she was able to get out was "nobody died", she knew exactly how it sounded. $1-3/month would have saved me from that call, which I would gladly pay to never get a call like that again.
I convinced my mom to setup Time Machine as a backup, so at least she'd have something. However, she had a laptop, so she'd regularly unplug the drive. She'd occasionally plug it in when she remembered, but would go months between backups. The longer she waited, the longer it took when she did it, and the less likely she was to do it. Eventually the drive died and when she finally told me about it and I took a look, she hadn't backed up in over 2 years and even that 2 year old backup was on a dead drive. I've actually seen patterns like this with a lot of people. When the external drive can't be plugged in all the time, backups become very irregular and infrequent.
My dad is ultra paranoid about backups and spent his whole career in tech. At one point be bought 2 of the same computers, so if something happened to one he had an identical backup. He had backup software running on his main PC, then would occasionally clone that drive to store it off-site. When he had an issue with the backup software, tech support told him to wipe out his backup and start it again. He told the tech he was nervous about this, because if his main hard drive failed during that initial backup, he'd lose everything. The tech said that was very unlikely... well, it happened. He deleted the backup, and then right after that the main hard drive failed. He was lucky he had the 2nd off-site copy and it was only 2 weeks old. He was able to load that onto the backup PC. Had he been anyone else in this story, or even the person in the article, he would have lost it all.
While having a cloud-only backup is a risk, a cloud backup does offer a more up-to-date backup, even for a laptop, than most will have with a local drive. It protects against local hardware failing. It also protects against fire and theft. I don't think dismissing the idea all together is great. It also solves the storage issue, where someone can have access to a full large library of photos without having to have a disk large enough to have them all locally. This can save a ton of money, when the alternative is needing to get a massive amount of storage on every device (computer and phone). It also solves the issue of running out of space all the time.
For the average user, a cloud backup from a reputable company that won't abandon the user base without warning, is a lot better than anything they'd otherwise do, even if it's not perfect on it's own. Most users are not willing or able to play sys admin in their free time, and it's always a balance between time, money, skill, convenience, paranoia, and consistency.