Self-Contained Cloud Backup Services

Oodles of online services offer backups for Mac users; see the online appendixes and the Wirecutter article The Best Online Cloud Backup Service. Some of the most popular services are:

• Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (formerly called Acronis True Image) has a respectable set of features for storing versioned backups either on local drives or to the company’s proprietary cloud storage. You can pay $49.99 for a one-year subscription to the app alone, with no cloud storage; $54.99 per year for a plan that includes 50 GB of storage; $89.99 per year for a plan that includes 500 GB of storage; or $124.99 per year for a plan that includes 1 TB of storage. (Multi-user licenses and additional storage are also available and are quite reasonably priced.) Among many other features, Acronis can back up your Microsoft 365 data, store a copy of your entire disk in the cloud, and even restore an entire disk to a bootable state from a cloud backup. The catch is that this requires transferring more data than most home broadband connections can handle in any reasonable period of time. (And in any case, you can’t boot directly from your duplicate in the cloud; you must first restore it to local storage.)

• Backblaze: This service is my top pick, and it’s what I use for my own family. Backblaze charges $7 per month or $70 per year (per computer) for unlimited data storage. Setup is almost trivially easy, and I’ve found it to be speedy and reliable. By default, Backblaze backs up all your important files without requiring configuration other than entering your email address. It excludes system files and items in your /Applications folder, among others. You can adjust what’s in and what’s out in System Settings/System Preferences > Backblaze. To restore files, you can download them (individually or as a ZIP archive) from the web or have Backblaze mail you the files overnight on an external hard drive. (In fact, the restore-by-mail option is effectively free; if you send back the drive after restoring your data, Backblaze refunds the cost of the service.)

  Either way, a downside to Backblaze is that when restoring files, you must manually move them to where they belong; it won’t put them back in place automatically. Another potential downside for some users is that Backblaze’s backups (and restores) mingle files from all the different user accounts on your Mac; if it’s important to keep each user’s data strictly private, that might be an issue. By default, Backblaze stores old versions and deleted files for only 30 days, which is shorter than I prefer, but you can extend that to a year for an extra $2 per month—or forever for an extra $2 per month plus $0.005 per gigabyte per month for files that were updated, changed, or deleted more than a year ago. Backblaze doesn’t back up or restore some Mac metadata (such as ownership and permissions, creation dates, and Finder tags), a relatively minor point for most people, but potentially problematic when it comes to, for example, backups of your Photos library. All things considered, though, I think it’s superior to the competition—and if ease of setup is your main consideration, Backblaze is the one to beat.

• IDrive: IDrive, the runner-up in the Wirecutter roundup, offers a maximum of 10 TB of storage for backups from unlimited computers, compared to Backblaze’s unlimited storage for a single computer. It costs slightly more ($79.50 per year, though with a discount for the first year). IDrive offers indefinite retention of deleted files (versus Backblaze’s default 30 days) and up to 30 old versions of each file, supports network volumes as source or destination, lets you seed your initial backup (by mailing in a hard drive) for free, and includes a way to sync data across your devices. It even has an app that runs on some NAS models, enabling you to back up their data to cloud storage. You can find considerably more detail about this service in the Wirecutter article.

Note: All these services offer compression, encryption, and delta encoding for efficient uploads and secure storage. They also offer iOS apps with which you can view and download backed-up files while away from your Mac.

But lest the descriptions above come across as unqualified endorsements, let me take a moment to temper your expectations. With a few web searches, you can easily come up with bad reviews and complaints about all of the services above, as with other online backup services you may encounter. Readers have sent me stories of bad customer service and technical issues, and I’ve had occasional negative experiences myself. Of course, you can also find lots of glowing reviews and reports that any given service is spectacular. Each person’s situation is unique, after all. Don’t assume that one person’s bad experience means you’ll have a bad experience, but also don’t necessarily trust all the shiny marketing statements.

In short, don’t expect perfection, but don’t let uncertainty prevent you from using online backups, either. As with any type of backup, you should regularly test restoring files (see Test Your Versioned Backup) and be prepared to try more than one service before finding one you’re happy with.

BYOS (Bring Your Own Software) Internet Backups

The other category of internet backup services isn’t explicitly designed for backup at all; it’s just storage space that you can use in whatever way you want. To use it for backups, you must supply your own backup software, and in some cases additional software that enables your backup app to mount or otherwise interact with the storage space.

Although there are numerous services like this, I’ve chosen just a handful as examples:

• Amazon S3 and Glacier: Amazon.com’s S3, or Simple Storage Service, provides virtually limitless—yet modestly priced—online storage, complete with encrypted transfer. S3 charges separately for data storage (rates start at $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard storage or $0.0125 per gigabyte per month for “infrequent access” storage, and vary depending on where the data is stored), data transfer ($0.09 per gigabyte downloaded after the first one), and requests, meaning operations that affect the data (prices vary depending on the request type; delete requests are free). Prices go down as volume goes up, and prices in Europe are slightly higher.

  In any case, given Amazon’s pricing structure for S3 storage, if you keep more than about 218 GB of data online, other services are more economical. As it turns out, even Amazon now offers a cheaper service, called Glacier, with prices as low as $0.004 per gigabyte per month—but the catch is that because Glacier is intended for long-term storage, it can take several hours to access files when you want to restore them. (There’s also now Glacier Deep Archive, which costs only $0.0009 per gigabyte per month but delays restoration time by up to 12 hours.)

  Regardless of whether you use S3 or Glacier, getting at Amazon’s online storage space requires both nontrivial setup and third-party software. The most popular tool to access your S3 or Glacier storage space from a Mac is Arq; see Arq (including the note there about similar apps) and Arq Tips.

• Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: B2 from Backblaze is storage only, without the backup app and service. The cost is a mere $0.005 per gigabyte per month (in other words, 1 TB for $5 per month). Only a few consumer-friendly Mac backups apps (such as Arq and Retrospect) support it so far, but more are likely on their way (and there are also command-line clients that work on the Mac).

• Google Drive: Google Drive, now part of a Google Onemembership plan, costs $1.99 per month for 100 GB, $2.99 per month for 200 GB, or $9.99 per month for 2 TB, and you get 15 GB for free. Although you can use many tools to back up your data to Google Drive, Google offers their own Backup and Sync app that does exactly what its name suggests.

• Google Storage Nearline, Coldline, and Archive: Google’s answer to Amazon Glacier, Nearline costs slightly more at $0.01 per gigabyte per month but doesn’t make you wait hours to access your data. Coldline costs only $0.004 per gigabyte per month but is designed for storage you don’t need to access frequently or quickly, while Archive costs $0.0012 per month and takes even longer to access. Nearline, Coldline, and Archive require third-party software—and once again, Arq is the natural choice if you want to use this online storage space to back up your Mac (see Choose Another Versioned Backup App and Arq Tips).

• Wasabi: A relative newcomer, Wasabi costs as little as $0.0059 per gigabyte per month (which translates to $5.99 per month for 1 TB), with no additional fees for data transfer, making it comparable in price to other services but with considerably better performance than Amazon’s offerings—even the standard S3 service. Because it uses the same API as S3, it’s compatible with any backup app that can use S3.

Before you settle on one of these providers (and especially before you start uploading terabytes of data), be sure to read the fine print of its terms of service carefully. Some of these services limit your upload rate (typically after you’ve uploaded a certain amount of data or a certain number of files), meaning it could take a surprisingly long time to back up and restore your data. Although price doesn’t strictly correlate to performance, some of the less expensive services yield slow effective transfer speeds that may significantly reduce their perceived value.

Cloud Backup Services: Pros and Cons

On the plus side, cloud backup services keep your files safely offsite with absolutely no effort on your part—and they do so for every backup you perform with your cloud backup software, not merely on a weekly (or “whenever I remember”) basis. They also encrypt your files and usually make their own redundant, offsite copies of your data. If you’re unable to conveniently store a set of backup media outside your home or office, an internet backup service can make that process painless. Even if you do maintain diligent offsite backups, an internet backup service can provide extra insurance for particularly important files.

Turning to the cons, these services are no substitute for duplicates; if you want bootable duplicates, you’ll still have to maintain those locally yourself. And with cloud backups, the biggest issue is usually speed: even with a fast broadband connection, you could easily spend weeks doing an initial full upload of a moderately large disk, and of course restoring files may also be quite slow. So you may want to limit the files you back up online—perhaps only the contents of your home folder, or even just your ~/Documents folder. (Alternatively, choose a service such as IDrive that lets you seed your initial backup by sending them an external hard drive.) Finally, you may need to think about monthly data caps and other restrictions your ISP may have on how you transfer data. Check with your ISP to confirm that using an online backup service won’t run afoul of their policies.

For all these reasons, most people should consider internet backup services as a supplement to conventional backup methods—a convenient way to get offsite storage—not as a replacement for local backup media.

As I said earlier, I use Backblaze for my family’s backups. It’s not perfect, but all things considered I think Backblaze is the best choice for most people right now.