Backing Up the Cloud (storage)?

While Cloud storage is supposed to be always available, and some (most?) even provide the ability to revert files to a previous version for a specified period, including recovering deleted files, these recovering capabilities have limitations.

A case could be to just rely on the prominent cloud storage players for both availability as well as “backup.” Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud Drive, and Google Drive all offer 30-day retention on file changes and deletions. This means you can recover a deleted file, or you can revert to a previous version if things get changed. 30-days is a short-term backup window… and my issue is I may not realize something is gone/changed until that 30-day window has passed. In that case, it’s useless. Also, as far as I’m concerned, real backup has to be something that is not maintained on the same site/storage as the source.

I mostly abandoned the Dropbox platform due to cost and the fact that I have a ton of cloud storage from other providers that are either free or something I already needed (2TB of iCloud for my photo storage, 1TB of OneDrive with my Office365 subscription, plus 15GB of Google Drive… just because I have an account). I still have the free Dropbox account and store a few things related to apps in there, but nothing more than that. One thing that Dropbox offered in its early days, and I almost bought at the time, was an unlimited retention window for an additional charge per year. I want to say it was only $30 more per year! I am pretty sure that option is no longer available, and I am wondering if they even let people grandfather forward with that option. That option might be good enough, but what happens if Dropbox goes away? Probably not going to happen, but you get my point.

Backup from one Cloud provider to another for a longer retention

I’m not in the business of trying to maintain a ton of storage “on-prem” anymore. All of my “user data” is stored on cloud storage. I do have a QNAP NAS in my basement with something like 24TB of capacity, but that is mainly for media and to act as my Plex server. One of the reasons I got the specific QNAP model I got was because it runs the Plex server portion itself, so no separate server to maintain. Aside from that, I also do local “backups” of my iMac Pro’s internal storage using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to an external USB drive, just in case something were to happen to my internal storage. I can boot up from that external drive, and I can also use it to restore my system quickly to the replacement drive. I did this with my laptop for years as well. This has nothing to do with incremental backups of files. I just do a full clone daily. CCC does have a SafetyNet feature that uses the extra room on the drive to store file changes and deletions, so I guess I could recover something for some time (based on usable capacity and not time), but that was never my intention with that solution. I suppose, if I got a large enough drive (or even bigger), this could be some sort of file-change/deletion backup… so it’s a possibility. The question of drive cost would need to come into play at this point to weigh cost-vs-value. I’m dragging this localized thought process out a bit, but I could also get a second external drive for data backup (not a drive clone, but simply file backup and changes).

At any rate, my suggestion is to possibly backup critical stuff or files that change to another cloud storage provider for the “just in case” past the standard 30-day retention window. Maybe this is every week or even monthly or quarterly, depending on the change rate of the things backed up, but it could provide some failsafe for those important files you store in the cloud. I would want this backup tool to only copy new changes from one backup to another. Meaning, if a file doesn’t change, it doesn’t use up any additional capacity on the next backup.

I am wondering if Arq could be this solution. I read somewhere recently that Arq supports OneDrive (and other cloud storage providers), and I barely use the space I have through my personal Office365 subscription (1TB).

Luckily, I was smart enough in 2016 to purchase a lifetime upgrade license to Arq, so I can get the latest version and benefit from these new features.

Cloud-based Backup Vendors

BackBlaze, and other cloud backup vendors, have a similar retention period to the regular cloud storage vendors. Meaning, deletions, even if by accident, are removed from your backup after 30 days. So, in essence, it is no better than just having your files in cloud storage from the start. No benefit. The only possible benefit, with something like BackBlaze Personal Backup, is that you get “unlimited” storage space for around $6/mo. But, keep that 30-day retention in mind, and you can see why it’s “unlimited.” It’s truly limited to whatever your local storage is. 😒

Arq also has an option for its own cloud-based backup storage, which looks to be similar to what BackBlaze B2 and others are offering.

Here’s what blows my mind about these cloud-based backup solutions: They cost the same or more per TB than traditional cloud file storage. They try to trick your mind by displaying price per GB, with a number like $0.005/GB, but when you multiply this by, say, 2,000 to calculate 2TB, the cost is $10/month, just like iCloud’s 2TB offering. In essence, the 1TB of space you get with your Office365 subscription, which includes the Microsoft Office suite of applications, is a pretty killer deal. However, to add an additional 1TB of storage to OneDrive, to get it to 2TB, costs an extra $10/mo.

I suppose, one could argue, that you may not need to backup everything, and therefore do not need as much storage as you might buy for your cloud file storage. Also, I pay for more cloud file storage than I use at the moment because I don’t want to keep paying for upgrades every so often as I consume it.

Where my head is at

The only real solution in my mind is to roll-your-own with a backup application (CCC, Arq, etc.), or script, that backs up from one place to another, but YOU control the retention/pruning period yourself. If you do this for only a subset of your files in the cloud, it can help with the required size of the backup space needed. My thought would be to store critical data in a few specific locations/folders and then back just those folders up to a secondary cloud provider.

Alternatively, using CCC to back up your cloud files to a local external hard drive, either as part of a bootable clone with SafetyNet or not worrying about having a bootable clone and only backing up data to an external drive, you would have a solution you can control and manage retention periods (or just let it tail the pruning based on available capacity).

In the end, I’m not yet sure what I will do, if anything. I stopped making backups because the things I care about most are my photos, and I have them in 3 places already in an automated fashion (local, iCloud & Google Photos). Besides, Google Photos doesn’t delete its copy if I delete my local/iCloud copy.

If I decide to do something, it will certainly be to figure out what is most important/critical, isolate those files so I can backup just those files, and then either use Arq to my other cloud storage provider or CCC/Arq to backup to a local external hard drive. I can’t see needing anything more than that.

The genesis of this post came from needing to restore my new blog site from a backup and not having the timeframe that I needed. As I started to look around at options and methodologies, I read something I already knew… your backups should not be on the same site as the source. For my blog, I went with UpdraftPlus Premium, and I backup my website to my OneDrive storage with my custom retention period.

This research and thought process made me realize I don’t currently back up anything else (other than my photos in some fashion), which led me down the thought-path above.

What do you do or think is best? Leave a comment. I am interested.