- Microsoft Office Cloud Backup
- Microsoft Onedrive Cloud Backup
- Microsoft 365 Cloud Backup
- Microsoft Cloud Storage Free
The Microsoft Authenticator app backs up your account credentials and related app settings, such as the order of your accounts, to the cloud. After backup, you can also use the app to recover your information on a new device, potentially avoiding getting locked out or having to recreate accounts. UpSafe provides scheduled automated backup and accurate restore to protect your data. By default, OFFICE 365 CLOUD BACKUP works with Azure AD. To get started, sign up for OFFICE 365 CLOUD BACKUP using an account in your instance of Azure AD.
Which Cloud is Best? Microsoft word tutorial. How to Back Up Your Windows 10 PC to an External Hard Drive - Duration: 4:11. Integral IT 387,777 views. How to configure your Synology Disk station to use Microsoft Azure as a cloud backup destination 1. Create an Azure subscription. Create a new Storage account. Add a new container. Copy Access Key. Use Synology Hyper Backup to select Microsoft Azure as the backup destination service.
iDrive Personal
IDrive is best for anyone who has multiple machines to back up. Just keep an eye on the 2TB or 5TB storage limit.
Best Cloud Backup Service ValueBackblaze
Backblaze is cheap, simple, fast and easy to use. But you might want to shop around if you have multiple machines to back up.
Best Cloud Backup Service for Power UsersAcronis True Image
Acronis True Image is expensive and complicated, but it offers a wide range of options and features for hard-core PC users.
You may regularly back up your computer's data to an external hard drive — and if not, you should — but that really won't be enough. A cloud-backup service can help.
Audials one 2018 download. Both your PC and your local backup drive could be lost at the same time to theft, flood or fire. The best cloud backup services, also known as online-backup services, help you avoid such data disasters. They copy your valuable information to an offsite repository that never goes offline and is available from anywhere, preventing total catastrophe.
Based on more than 40 hours of testing, we think the best cloud backup service is IDrive ($13.90 for the first year for Tom's Guide readers), which backs up an unlimited number of PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets for a reasonable price. IDrive is the best choice if you have multiple computers and phones to back up.
Our value pick is the very user-friendly Backblaze, which gives you unlimited storage space for just $60 per year, but backs up only one machine (and an attached external drive) per account. Backblaze is the best cloud backup service if you have a single computer and just want to back it up without worrying about the details.
News and updates
— For its 15th anniversary, Zoolz is offering very cheap cloud-backup plans to new customers. One terabyte of 'cold' storage now costs $19.95 per year, and 5 terabytes $49.95 per year. Those prices will not go up after the first year. However, these are for single users, and single computers, only; the multi-user plans for home users no longer seem to be offered.
— Backblaze has opened a new data center, aka server farm, in Amsterdam, the company's first data center outside of the United States. From now on, customers creating new Backblaze accounts can choose whether the data is stored in the 'US West' (Sacramento and Phoenix) or 'EU Central' regions. That selection will be permanent.
— Acronis has updated its True Image software to the 2020 version, adding a feature that can back up data to both the Acronis cloud and your local storage drive simultaneously to make sure your backups are never out of sync. The new software also has better power and Wi-Fi network management for laptop backups.
How we tested and rated the best cloud backup services
We took into consideration several factors: storage costs, ease of file restoration, computer-resource usage, unique features and ease of use and of installation. Upload speed also matters, because while your initial backup happens only once, the backup can take days or even weeks if it's several hundred gigabytes.
We give bonus points to those online-backup services that let you mail in a hard drive full of data to start the process or send you one to restore your data.
Our testing and evaluating was done on a 2017 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro booting into Windows 10. Mobile apps were run on a Google Pixel XL 2 running Android 8.1 Oreo. We monitored which quickly creates a bootable file-restoration tool.
The downsides are that Acronis can get expensive, has a confusing pricing structure and doesn't back up external or networked drives.
Other cloud backup services reviewed
Carbonite Safe
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of devices: Up to 5 computers, but no volume discount | Storage limit: Unlimited | External drive backups: Not with basic plan | Mobile device backups: No | System and application backups: No | Two factor authentication: Yes | Drive shipping: Restore only
Reasons to Buy
Unique backup interface
Reasons to Avoid
Slow download speeds
No backups of external drives at lowest tier
$6
$24
Carbonite says it offers unlimited storage, but you'd better read the fine print, as it doesn't automatically back up large files, external drives, or any kind of video file, on its lowest pricing tier. To get those functions, you'll have to trade up to the point where Carbonite Safe is no longer competitive.
Multiple machines are supported on a single account, but each costs as much as the first. On the plus side, the software is attractive and easy to use.
SpiderOak One
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of devices: Unlimited | Storage limit: 5TB | External drive backups: Yes | Mobile device backups: No | System and application backups: Yes, but not by default | Two factor authentication: Only for legacy users | Drive shipping: No
Microsoft Office Cloud Backup
Reasons to Buy
Strong sharing and syncing features
Linux support
Reasons to Avoid
Steep learning curve
No physical backup or restoration option
$6
$11
$14
SpiderOak was the first online-backup (or online-syncing) service to make sure the customer held a private, exclusive encryption key. Most other cloud backup services now offer the same thing, but SpiderOak also has strong file-sharing and -syncing features, as well as support for unlimited machines and, if you insist, backups of system files and applications.
Yet SpiderOak's storage-space pricing is so high that it's more competitive with Dropbox than it is with IDrive, and while its file-restoration speed was amazingly fast, its initial upload speed was glacial.
Zoolz Cloud Backup
SPECIFICATIONS
Microsoft Onedrive Cloud Backup
Number of devices: Up to 5 computers, but only 1 per user | Storage limit: 4TB | External drive backups: Yes | Mobile device backups: No | System and application backups: Yes, but not by default | Two factor authentication: No | Drive shipping: No
Reasons to Buy
Minimal system impact
Reasons to Avoid
Very slow file recovery
Limited to single machine per user
Editor's note: Zoolz no longer offers cloud-backup service for consumers directly from its website, but does occasionally offer them through ads and social media. We're checking with Zoolz to see exactly what kind of cloud-backup solutions are available to home users.
Zoolz has a lot of features and an attractive, easy-to-use interface. The service permits multiuser accounts, lets you back up applications and system files and, at least at the time of this writing, is appealingly priced.
But its Achilles' heel is that the Zoolz storage servers are just rented space on Amazon's Glacier cloud service, which is agonizingly slow to access. It doesn't help that the Zoolz mobile apps are next to useless.
Online backup vs. online syncing vs. online storage
Cloud-backup services aren't the same as online-syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive. An online-syncing service creates a cloud-based mirror of a specific set of files or folders on your device, and pushes out identical copies of those files to all of your linked devices so that you can have immediate access to them.
Cloud-backup services are simpler. They continuously or periodically copy all or most of the files and folders on your computer to their own cloud servers. Your data stays on those servers until you need it, and with luck, you never will. Most cloud-backup services offer generous amounts of storage for a subscription fee that is much cheaper, gigabyte for gigabyte, than an online-syncing service.
Cheapest of all are cloud-storage services such as Box or Google Cloud. These let you offload files you don't immediately need to online servers, freeing up space on your hard drive. These can be dirt-cheap, sometimes as little as a few pennies per month per gigabyte, but there's often a fee to download files again. (The assumption is that you will never need to download all the files.) Backblaze has its own very affordable cloud-storage service called B2.
Encryption and differences
All of the cloud-backup services we tested in 2018 — Acronis True Image, Backblaze, Carbonite Safe, IDrive Personal, SpiderOak One and Zoolz Cloud Backup — protect your data with industry-standard encryption. They also let you encrypt your data yourself with your own private key before uploading the data, although only SpiderOak makes this the default option. (But if you lose your private key, the cloud-backup service can't recover your data.)
Otherwise, cloud-backup services can vary greatly. Some let you back up system files and applications, some back up smartphones and tablets as well as hard drives, some provide software to back up to a local drive, some let you share files with other people, and some even provide file-syncing or dead-storage functions.
But while a couple of online-backup services let you back up an unlimited number of devices, and a few others give you unlimited online storage space, none gives you unlimited space for unlimited devices.
October 07, 2019Traditional file-level backup solutions are great for small-scale restores and recovering data after accidental deletion. However, they are not suitable for business recovery as the downtime stretches beyond the acceptable duration. Also, they do not retain the content and information structure of the drive, leading to ineffective data restores that require additional time for reorganization. IDrive’s Disk Image Backup lets you carry out both system and file-level restores with all the content and information structure intact.
IDrive’s ‘Disk Image Backup’ feature captures hard drives as ‘image’ files that represent the entire content as it is. The disk image file can then be used to perform system restore on the same or different computer. In case you do not want to restore the disk image but merely want to access specific files or folders, you can simply mount the disk image on the OS, of any computer, and view and access the disk image as a separate drive. You can save the required data from the mounted drive.
The disk image files created using the IDrive cloud backup applications are cross-compatible. This means that irrespective of the OS of the backed up computer, the backup can be accessed from any PC, Mac or Linux system.
What Are The Features Offered By IDrive Cloud Backup?
- Multiple Device Backup: IDrive online backup lets you secure unlimited Macs, PCs, iOS, Android devices, servers, and NAS devices with a single subscription!
- Continuous Data Protection: IDrive automatically identifies the changes made to your local and cloud backup set – changes that are within 500 MB – and backs them up regularly, ensuring data protection between the scheduled backups.
- Incremental Backup: IDrive optimizes your cloud backup speed and storage space by following up full disk image backups with backups of only the modified portions of the files and folders.
- IDrive® Snapshots: Snapshots provides a historical view of the data in your IDrive cloud backup account and lets you perform point-in-time recovery — this feature protects your data against ransomware.
- Secure Online Backup: Your data is secured during transfer and storage with 256-bit AES encryption and a user-defined key that is not saved on the IDrive server.
What More Can You Do With IDrive Online Backup?
Microsoft 365 Cloud Backup
- Manage Computers: Manage and monitor the online backup of all the computers in your account from anywhere with the web-based console.
- IDrive Express™: Use IDrive’s free data shuttle service to backup or retrieve several gigabytes of your data to or from the cloud account within a short duration!
- Server Backup: Backup running databases and a host of servers such as MS Exchange Server, MS SQL Server, MS SharePoint Server, Oracle Server, Hyper-V, Office 365 Mailbox, VMware and Linux Servers.
Microsoft Cloud Storage Free
Get the complete data protection solution for your business. Sign up with IDrive online backup!