Ars Archivum: The Best Cloud Backup Services That Are Worth Your Money

If there’s one computing rule that every system administrator preaches, it’s always back up important data. Unfortunately, even among system administrators, this rule is more often preached than practiced: backups tend to be slow, cumbersome, and ignored for years until (desperately) needed, by which time it’s often too late to do anything. Right..

Luckily, backing up doesn’t have to be tedious—and there are plenty of relatively inexpensive, consumer-friendly cloud services that make it easy to protect your data. The five services we discuss in this article – Carbonite, Arq, iDrive, Spideroak One, and Backblaze – are cloud-based and inexpensive, and they run seamlessly in the background.

What are we looking for

For a backup service to work, it must be easy to install and use. In addition to ease of use, our preferred solution should be affordable and have a simple billing model. It should also work reliably in the background, offer easy restore, and provide archive depth – meaning you’ll have backups of previous versions of your files in addition to your current saved copy.

We also tested each backup service for backup and restore speed, although this was not our main consideration. For most people, backup speed isn’t a big issue for everyday use, but when you’re using a cloud backup service for the first time, higher throughput can mean the difference between one week and six months to create your first full backup! We were also interested in additional features, including, but not limited to, cross-platform support (our test platform is Windows 10) and end-to-end encryption.

iDrive: the best choice Ars Archivem

We found iDrive to be the clear winner of the five cloud backup services we tested, ticking all the boxes on our list:

• Easy to install and use
• High backup speed (compared to other cloud providers)
• Continuous backup (which actually works correctly) as well as scheduled backups.
• End-to-end encryption protects your backups from prying eyes
• Archive depth (as file version), with easy access to older file versions
• Advanced features for advanced users – SQL, Exchange, Oracle, Sharepoint, VMWare, Hyper-V, system cloning, etc.
• Aggressive cross-platform – Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS are supported.
• Reasonable, predictable “personal”prices – $60 per year for 5 TB from any number of devices.
• The completely free “Basic”tier offers 10GB without the need for a credit card, which means you can test the service hassle-free.
• Ability to backup to local media, as well as to the cloud storage

We’ll detail how we tested each service and how iDrive performed in those tests below, but if you want a quick recommendation, here it is. The only caveat is that iDrive won’t cater to data drives looking for unlimited backup space, but even that caveat is sort of a recommendation. The 5TB iDrive listed is more than enough for most users, and the cap you set means you don’t run the risk of waking up one day and getting an email saying you’re “abusing”the service and your account will be capped accordingly.