Question Online backup - idrive, Google, or One Drive

[jm88]

For several years, I have been using iDrive to backup my entire hard drive to. I have never had to restore anything, but have been able to locate the files through the web interface so I guess it is working properly. I also have a Microsoft 365 subscription for the family so we each have our own One Drive that everything syncs to. In addition, I currently have a 200 GB Google plan, shared with the family, primarily used for the Google Photo backup. My question is, with all of this other storage I have, do I still need to use iDrive? The way I understand it, the One Drive is not really a backup as it just syncs the files back and forth, so that wouldn't be a reliable backup source, but what about Google? We are getting close to the 200 GB for the photo storage anyways so I might need to upgrade that, so I am trying to determine if that works as backup like iDrive does and if i could possibly eliminate that.

 

[Ralston18]

This:

I have never had to restore anything, but have been able to locate the files through the web interface so I guess it is working properly."

Not good to guess. Look and check to be sure. Not uncommon that files are listed but are unreadable/unrecoverable. Do some practice recoveries - document the process. Sooner rather than later.

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If budget is not a constraint then just continue to use the existing resources and drives.

Diversity is a form of protection.

The difficult part is indeed keeping all of the backups organized and synched.

And, if storage is running a bit low, it is very likely that there are some things that could be deleted.

Even then those items could be put on a hard drive and the drive stored somewhere - just for sake of doing so.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

 

[hotaru.hino]

If privacy is a concern, iDrive is still preferable because the data you send is encrypted beforehand. And they don't have the key so they can't peek into what it is.

You can still do this with Google Drive or One Drive if you upload encrypted archive files, but that's tedious