OK Now I am rethinking my plan after using one drive for a day and I see it going to be a manual process. I also want to have the option to get a hard disk to restore my files. So I am looking at black blaze B2 again. Tech support recommended cloud berry backup. Anyone have any experience. I will mainly be uploading photos and don't care for compression so it looks like the free cloudberry will work. Or should I be looking at are. Once I start with one backup program am I stuck with it?
I've been using Arq for many years, though when I started there wasn't competition in this particular field (of backup front-ends to different cloud storage providers). Haven't seen Cloudberry before. The format Arq uses is not portable to other software (that is, I think they've published source code to access the data outside of Arq, but you won't be easily able to have some other software like Cloudberry just read/update those backups - I expect you may have the same problem going the other way), so, yeah, once you start with one backup program, don't expect those backups to be portable into some other program. As they say in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, "Choose wisely".
I've been using Arq with Amazon S3 (originally that was the only option), but it now supports multiple storage services, and they have a
nice comparison article/table that links to the various services (useful for generally comparing providers no matter which backup software you choose). I used this to go get more pricing data for the various services to compare (I have perhaps 1TB to worry about, but a relative has many TBs of raw camera images to back up).
In comparing the services, one thing that struck me was, you can use Arq to back up to OneDrive, and many of us get 1TB free with Office 365, but that's
all you can get - with other services you can pay more for additional storage, but OneDrive appears to top out at 1TB (you get 5TB with a family plan, but it looks like that's 1TB attached to each of 5 user accounts, that you can't pool together). As Arq targets, Dropbox and Google Drive also have limitations on getting arbitrarily more storage. A surprise for me, between looking at that Arq storage comparison, and reading this article and the comments and poking at the various options, is that Backblaze (not B2, their main service) looks like a much more solid/promising offering than I remember from some years back. After examining the options, I think
I'm going to:
a) keep using Arq but pare down the backup set considerably (it started just as my most important files, but has crept to include a bunch of stuff that it shouldn't - e.g. iCloud/calendar behind-the-scenes stuff best left to iCloud to handle - I want that data, of course, but restoring it from Arq wouldn't work well, and Apple can sync it up on a new machine/install);
b) possibly change the location of my Arq backups from S3 to Amazon Drive or B2 (entirely based on lower cost for comparable service);
c) consider using Backblaze (their main all-you-can-eat service) for myself (in addition to Arq-for-a-small-set-of-files and Time Machine locally), to have an off-site full-machine backup; and,
d) definitely get my relative onto Backblaze for backing up his machine and his terabytes of photos (looks like the most cost effective backup solution for him is actually to use Backblaze and upgrade to a faster internet connection).
BTW, two things Backblaze won't handle are:
1) VMs (
by default, though their FAQ details how to add them to the backup, with cautions that they can generate a lot of backup traffic if you use them frequently); and,
2) Boot Camp partitions (though none of the other options really handle that well, anyway - you can install Backblaze into the Boot Camp partition and then back it up as a separate machine, but then, only when it's running and with a separate $5/mo license, since it looks to them like a separate machine). One useful tool for dealing with Boot Camp partitions is
Winclone.
The one other thing I'd add, since this covers all my favorite backup bits, is
SuperDuper!, which is great for cloning a drive and then incrementally updating that clone. This is the same job that Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) handles - I believe they've exchanged the crown several times over the years. When I started, SuperDuper was the better choice - I don't know that either has a clear advantage at the moment.
