My 90% discount on the first year of IDrive (5 TB for $6.95 instead of $69.50) is almost over. While backups have been working fine, restores have been rather slow and their support has no clue how to fix this (months of mails/chats without progress).
Since I already subscribe to Office 365 I have 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage (that I’m currently not using - and which seems to be enough for my backup). I’m considering to buy Arq (a single purchase instead of a subscription) to backup to OneDrive instead of using a dedicated online backup service (with additional monthly/yearly costs).
That is exactly what I did until about two years ago.
No issues at all. It worked just great.
I think it is a good idea because OneDrive is reliable and you already have this cloud solution available to you! Why not?
Arq is a fantastic application that can be used with a lot of backup storage solutions.
I stopped using Arq because of my data being on a NAS: it did not make sense any longer to have a Mac running in order to backup data to the cloud that is sitting on a NAS, when the NAS actually can do the same on its own.
But be it as it may: OneDrive can be used for online backups. Why not? The only thing is that there is this 1 TB limit: you cannot extend your storage. But then again: even that can be done with a Office 365 Home license (5 users with 1 TB for every user). I did backup 2.5 TB to OneDrive using Arq in combination with three OneDrive accounts. It worked just fine.
I did exactly that for 2 years… using the 1 TB OneDrive and Arq.
Works so far but the Upload was soo slow. I also had error messages when I tried to delete some of my files which caused me to look around for alternatives.
So far I’m not disappointed with the upload speed (it took me several days to upload all relevant files to IDrive, so I need to be patient anyway).
One of advantage of IDrive is that it keeps up to 30 versions of a file, but only the most recent version counts for your disk quota. Let’s see how that works out with the limited 1 TB quota of OneDrive, where every version adds up to that budget…
EDIT: Right after posting this Arq claimed it finished uploading the first 30 GB I tried as a test, but it does not offer them for restore… (and there’s only 7 GB in OneDrive) This is a very bad start…
I use Arq to backup to both Backblaze B2 and OneDrive. While the latter generates occasional error messages, especially if I’m working on something while Arq does its hourly thing, my results have been good overall.
