Compare
Air-Gapped Vault vs. Cloud-Only Backup
Cloud backup is faster, cheaper per terabyte, and easier to test. It is also reachable, and that is the whole argument.
Bring your retention schedule. We will tell you what it actually costs to meet it.
Side by side
| Category | Intervault Media | Cloud-Only Backup |
|---|---|---|
| Restore speed for a single file | Hours to days — a courier has to move | Minutes. Cloud wins clearly here |
| Cost per TB | Higher for large volumes | Lower, and falling |
| Reachable by an attacker | No — no network interface exists | Yes, via credentials, API keys, or a compromised admin |
| Survives credential compromise | Yes | Only if immutability was configured correctly and before the breach |
| Survives vendor failure or account closure | Yes — the media is yours and it is here | No. Account loss is total loss |
| Egress cost on a full restore | None | Often the largest single line item in a real recovery |
| Regional disaster | Hardened 9R vault, Category 5 rated | Depends entirely on region selection |
| Auditable physical custody | Barcode chain of custody per item | Logs, which are themselves data |
The fair case
What Cloud-Only Backup genuinely does better
Cloud backup wins on nearly everything that matters day to day, and pretending otherwise would be silly. It is automated, so it does not depend on anyone remembering. It is versioned, so a file deleted on Tuesday can come back. It is geographically redundant by default, restores in minutes rather than hours, and needs no vehicle, no schedule and no signature. For the overwhelming majority of recovery events — a deleted folder, a failed laptop, ransomware caught early — cloud is simply the better answer and we would tell any client to have it.
The limit
Where the gap is
The gap is not reliability, it is dependency. A cloud-only position means every copy you hold lives inside one account, reachable with one set of credentials, governed by one contract. That concentrates three risks that have nothing to do with whether the provider's storage works: an account lockout or a billing failure, an administrative compromise that reaches the backups because the same credentials reach everything, and a provider or contract change you did not choose. Some frameworks also expect a copy in a form that cannot be altered, which is a question about medium rather than about durability. An offline physical copy is not a better backup — it is a copy that fails for different reasons than the first one.
Our view
The honest verdict
Cloud should be your fast tier — it is better at everything about day-to-day recovery. The vault copy is for the day the cloud account itself is the problem: ransomware with admin credentials, a billing lapse, a vendor dispute, or a mis-set immutability policy. Most shops we work with run both, and that is the right answer.
Other comparisons
Vaulted Tape vs. Tape Kept On Site
You already own the tapes. The question is only where they sleep, and whether the same event can take both the systems and the backups.
Read more →
Local Vault vs. a National Records Vendor
The national vendors are competent and enormous, and for a multi-state footprint they are usually the right call. For a South Florida business the trade is different.
Read more →
Media Vault vs. a Self-Storage Unit
It happens more than you would think — a unit down the road, a padlock, and a box of tapes. It fails on three separate grounds.
Read more →
See the vault before you decide.
Tours are private and by appointment. You will see the vault door, the man-trap entry, and the box sizes in person. No account relationship is required to visit.