Business Data Backup Cost: NAS vs Cloud vs External Drive — What Makes Sense

The cheapest backup solution isn't always the best one. What matters is whether you can actually recover from it when you need to.

"We have backup." This phrase covers a wide range. A company that has an external drive that was last plugged in three months ago technically "has backup." A company with a NAS doing hourly snapshots synced to an offsite cloud location also "has backup." The difference in recovery capability — and cost — is enormous.

Here's an honest comparison of the three main business backup approaches and what they actually cost in Vietnam.

The Core Trade-off: Recovery Speed vs. Cost

Before comparing options, understand the trade-off:

Recovery speed (RTO - Recovery Time Objective): How long does it take to get back to work after a failure? Recovery point (RPO - Recovery Point Objective): How far back do you lose data?

A backup you can't restore from quickly is not a good business backup. For small businesses, recovering from a complete data loss should take hours, not weeks.

Option 1: External Hard Drive

How it works: Manual or automated backup from computers to a USB external drive.

Setup cost:

• 2-4 TB external drive (Seagate, WD): 800,000-1,500,000 VND
• Additional drives for rotation: optional but recommended

Ongoing cost: Near zero. Electricity only.

Recovery speed: Fast (minutes to hours, depending on data volume). The drive is in the office, so there's no download time.

What it protects against:

• Accidental file deletion
• Computer failure
• Ransomware (if the drive is disconnected when encryption occurs)

What it doesn't protect against:

• Fire or flood destroying both the computer and the external drive
• Theft of the office
• Drive failure (the backup drive itself can fail)
• Ransomware that encrypts connected drives

Best practice: Use two external drives, rotating them — keep one at the office, one at a secure offsite location (manager's home, bank safety deposit). Swap them weekly.

Verdict: Lowest cost option, adequate for very small businesses. Serious gap: no offsite protection unless you maintain rotation discipline.

Option 2: NAS (Network Attached Storage)

How it works: A multi-drive storage device connected to your office network. Computers back up to the NAS automatically. The NAS may also sync to cloud.

Setup cost:

• Entry-level 2-bay NAS (Synology DS223, QNAP TS-233): 5,000,000-8,000,000 VND
• 2× hard drives (NAS-grade, 4TB each): 2,000,000-3,000,000 VND each
• Total: 9,000,000-14,000,000 VND

Ongoing cost:

• Electricity: ~300-500 VND/day
• Drive replacement: 1-2 drives every 3-5 years
• Cloud sync storage (optional): 200,000-500,000 VND/month if you add cloud

Recovery speed: Very fast. Data is on the local network — recovery takes minutes to hours.

What it protects against:

• Individual computer failures (recover from NAS in minutes)
• Accidental deletion (NAS keeps snapshots and recycle bin)
• Ransomware on one computer (other computers' files are on the NAS)

What it doesn't protect against:

• Catastrophic events (fire, flood, theft) if NAS is in the same location
• NAS drive failure (use RAID 1 or similar for redundancy within the NAS)

Solving the offsite gap: Configure the NAS to sync to cloud (Synology NAS integrates with Synology C2, Backblaze B2, or S3-compatible storage). This adds cloud backup at low cost while keeping the fast local recovery.

Verdict: Best balance of recovery speed and capability for small businesses with 5-20 computers. Requires one-time investment; ongoing costs are low.

Option 3: Cloud Backup

How it works: Backup software on each computer sends data directly to a cloud storage service.

Options and pricing (monthly):

• Backblaze Personal Backup: ~$9 USD/month (approximately 225,000 VND) per computer, unlimited storage. Good for individual workstations.
• Backblaze Business Backup: ~$9/computer/month
• Acronis Cyber Protect: ~$5-8/month per computer for basic backup. More expensive for comprehensive protection.
• Veeam (for servers/VMs): Pricing varies; suited for virtual machine environments.
• OneDrive/Google Drive: Not true backup (sync, not backup) — protects against deletion with version history, but not against all failure scenarios.

For a 10-computer office with Backblaze Business: ~$90 USD/month (~2,250,000 VND/month)

Recovery speed: Depends on internet speed. Recovering 500 GB of data at 100 Mbps download takes several hours. For large data sets, some services offer "restore by mail" — they ship a physical drive with your data.

What it protects against:

• Fires, floods, theft (data is offsite by definition)
• Complete office destruction
• Ransomware (if backup isn't continuously synced and you have version history)

What it doesn't protect against:

• If your backup tool had ransomware itself (some tools have safeguards)
• Slow recovery if internet is the bottleneck

Verdict: Essential offsite component, but slow recovery for large data. Should be combined with a local backup option for fast recovery.

The Recommended Approach: Hybrid (Local + Cloud)

For most small businesses, the best approach combines:

1. NAS in the office for fast local recovery
2. Cloud backup for offsite protection against catastrophic events

Cost estimate for a 10-computer office:

• NAS setup: 10,000,000-15,000,000 VND one-time
• Cloud sync (Backblaze B2 or similar): 200,000-500,000 VND/month
• Total ongoing: 200,000-500,000 VND/month (after initial setup)

This covers most disaster scenarios at a very low ongoing cost.

For businesses where recovery speed is critical (you cannot afford more than 1-2 hours of downtime), add Microsoft 365 with SharePoint for document storage — cloud-native means recovery is immediate.

Real Questions to Answer Before Choosing

• How much data do we have? (Determines storage size and recovery time)
• How long can we afford to be without data? (RTO)
• How far back do we need to recover? (RPO — daily backup vs. hourly snapshots)
• Do we have multiple physical locations? (Affects onsite/offsite strategy)
• Is our internet connection fast enough for cloud backup and recovery?

Contact Vietify → to assess your backup needs and implement a solution, or start with a free IT assessment.

Vietify IT Services — Data backup setup and IT management for businesses in Vietnam.