Hello everyone! I have a bunch of space on Microsoft's One Drive that I'd like to use to back up important university docs but I have an issue: One Drive has it's own folder and I can't seem to find the option to back up certain folders. I don't want to move a part of the folders I'm working on inside the One Drive one because would be a giant mess for me. Do you have any idea of how I can get around the stupidity of Microsoft? Thanks!
I would recommend Amazon Glacier or similar for backups. Because Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox have a feature set aimed at different use cases. Yes you could use them for backup, but you already are seeing that it might be not the best choice. The other thing is that if you use those "drives" via automatic synchronization then all errors would also synchronize to the cloud (I did not explore new features of those drivers for a long time so please excuse me if they have some features toward doing backups like versioning/snapshots) - thus making the "backup" as much unusable as the originals.
Such "backup" would make you only protected again sudden HDD/SSD death.
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You can do this by creating symlinks in the OneDrive folder. It also works for Google Drive.
Google how to make symlinks, it's years since I did it on Windows.
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Thanks for the replies!
@jak_ub I don't want to spend money on cloud services because I already have 15GB of free One Drive cloud that I'm not using and I would like to use to save important data constantly in case something happens and I haven't done my backup in a week.
What do you mean?
@kuro68k That's a pretty smart idea. I tried to put shortcuts in that folder (like the ones you add to the desktop) in hope that One Drive would be smart enough to backup the file and not the link but my hopes were immediatly destroyed lol
By "drives" I meant Google Drive/OneDrive/Dropbox applications on windows.
For example if WannaCry would go through your synchronized folder then OneDrive would automatically upload new encrypted files to the cloud. So both files, on the disk and in the cloud, would be useless.
BTW. mklink is a command you should look into:
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Personally I now use a onedrive folder as the default place I store documents etc. on my work machine and then have a robocopy script to mirror that to a USB stick (bitlocker encrypted).
I have 2 USB sticks which I rotate so if I stupidly mess up a doc, and then back it up I can still go back 48 hours.
It's nothing clever, but its simple enough.
If I have the odd document that is sensitive I also have a boxcrypter folder in my onedrive, anything dropped in there is automatically encrypted - just have to make sure the keys never get lost!
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@jak_ub Oh okay, I understand what you mean to say. Yeah, in case of a cryptolocker I would be screwed anyway. I have a coule of HDDs that I connect only to do backups so, in case of a disaster like that I'm covered anyway. A much more likely thing to happen is the SSD gives out for some reason or a shock burns my whole laptop.
@BGL The documents are going to backup are nothing really personal with data about me on them. I'm going to backup books and notes taken during lecture so an encrypted folder is not that important in my case.
Thanks again to both of you for the discussion, I appreciate it!
For proper backups with history I use SpiderOak. It's properly encrypted on the client end, the client can handle hundreds of thousands of files and several TB without too much trouble, and upload speeds are reasonably good. Restoring works fine.
The only thing is that it's a bit expensive if you need more than the low end packages (100GB is $5/month). A couple of years ago they did a special offer of unlimited storage for $120/year which I took up.
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Isn't Mega the same way as SpiderOak but with a free account with 50GB of storage? I'm not that informed about cloud storage so I'm just guessing with the few informations I have.
The easiest way I've found to do it is using Link Shell Extension it's pretty awesome and as simple as
right-click "pick source" then right-click drop it where you want.
I love using symlinks for moving things such as parts of a game onto my SSD or on a ramdisk, perfect for games that load very slow or have frequent loading screens.
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I'm surely going to read how to do symlinks without the program you kindly linked to me but for convenience I'm going to use that program to generate symlinks. Thanks for the aswesome suggestion!
Mega is different I think. It doesn't do continual sync or keep old versions. There are bandwidth limits on the free version too. It's okay, but any system where you have to remember to do it is bound to fail.
I just jumped on the SpiderOak wagon today. I have yet to figure out how to restore old versions of the files (maybe because I only backed up once lol), but it says I got 250GB for free.
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There is no limit to historical versions in Spideroak, except the amount of space on your account.
I have 5.7TB on my account, which was de-duplicated (on the client side!) down to about 3.5TB.
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Oh btw, the 250GB is a trial and you are right 100GB is $5 per month, 250GB is $9 per month. I have no clue what it goes down to when the times comes. As far as I can see they don't have a totally free amount.
It is not mentioned often, but the way that Mega implements their encryption is not actually secure. Server side de-duplication cannot happen if they implemented everything securely.
- For complete PC backups, I would recommend Carbonite.
- For syncing-oriented cloud stuff, I would do ondrive/gdrive/dropbox. Onedrive is the cheapest but has a max limit and dropbox is the most expensive. Dropbox is the only provider that handles syncing and versioning correctly last I checked All other providers update the entire file (possibly very large) instead of keeping track of just the changed blocks. For versioning, onedrive/gdrive do not version non-document files. I have not tested SpiderOak but found their approach to be "backup" oriented, not syncing oriented.
- For actual backups/archival of specific files, I do Amazon Glacier. I think I have like 10 GB or something on their servers and it costs about 1-10 cents per month. They do not even bother billing me since it would cost more to bill me (like ~80c than they would actually get.
Other Stuff:
- For adding encryption to sync oriented approach, there is only https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/ ever since cloudfogger died. All other client-side encryption programs are require creating duplicate files. Their pricing model is terrible.
- There is also like, Rackspace and S3 and Google/Microsoft's garbage where you pay for what you use, but those are more for storing data that has to be accessed constantly, so for like backend storage for websites, and are kinda expensive for just backups.
- Services like "mediafire" and "solidfiles" are just website frontends for rackspace/S3 or similar. Mega fits in this category. Dropbox uses S3 as their backend I think, which is why it is so expensive. And Onedrive uses MS's Azure servers, hence why it is so cheap: they self-host and are large enough to afford to take a loss here and there. I think SpiderOak uses rackspace but I am not sure and their only selling point is that they bundle strong client-side encryption + storage together. But I would prefer the encryption be handled by a different application (boxcryptor/cf/7z/aescrypt/axcrypt) than the application used to upload data (cloudberry/jungledisk) personally.
- And finally there are specific, mostly Google, services for specific media. Google Play for music (20k songs free), Youtube for videos (set them to private or unlisted) and Google Photos.
Edit: Reasons.
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You are going to have to spend a little bit of money and I mean "little".
You can look at services like https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/ or https://www.backblaze.com/ if you need simplicity.
If you don't mind getting more technical look at AWS S3 or Glacier.
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Doing it via Linux (apologies I didn't see I was in a Windows thread) so I just use command line or script it.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-using-glacier.html
Windows users can use the same tools by installing Cygwin and running the commands from the Cygwin terminal
SpiderOak does deduplication. Retrieving older versions is a bit convoluted though. As far as I can see, you have to go to each file independently and restore it. Changelogs are available for every change, so it's easy enough to get a quick overview.
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