I am not the usual “consumer.” I have about 5 terabytes of personal photos and videos I want to save in the cloud plus personal documents.
In general, I use a Dropbox Individual Plus account for the day-to-day file management. It has 1 TB for a cost of CA$10.75 per month. There are Dropbox Enterprise accounts Standard for CA$17.50 and Advanced for CA$27.50 per month with 2TB and Unlimited storage respectively. But that’s more than the Amazon Prime has Amazon Drive Unlimited for CA$59.99 per year.
Previously I used Crashplan . It allowed unlimited backup from the network storage. Then in late 2016 I couldn’t backup from the network drives. So I quit Crashplan. I was paying about CA$20 per month anyhow for a family plan to allow multiple computers. Now it looks like they don’t even have that plan.
I store my data locally on a Synology DS12+ drive. I like it.
Here is what works
I use ExpanDrive on both my Mac and PC. It mounts the Cloud Drive on the Mac and the PC.
On the PC I have used SyncBackPro for backups for several years. It natively supports Amazon Cloud drive and costs CA$77.95. so if you only have a PC, you would not even need ExpanDrive if you don’t want to locally mount the Cloud Drive. Below is the destination choices in SyncBackPro. SyncBackPro was recently updated to version 8 to support the latest cloud storage APIs.
ChronoSync is a Mac program which costs US$49.99. But it doesn’t work with Amazon Drive; it only connects to S3. So, like I said, once I run ExpanDrive I can easily backup with ChronoSync.
I tried these following programs but don’t use them.
Synology has some utilities including their Hyper Backup. It will backup to cloud services including Amazon Drive. So I tested it.
It works, but the files are not backed up individually. The backup is managed by the Hyper Backup application, and the files are embedded into “buckets.” Buckets are how on a higher level, Amazon stores data. But, this won’t work for me, because then the only way to get individual files out of these buckets would be by using the Hyper Backup on my Synology. And that isn’t flexible enough.
How about Arq Backup? It’s US$49.99 per user and lifetime upgrades cost anther US$29.99.
Arq stores your encrypted backups in a format that’s open and documented. Store the data in your own Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Web Services (S3 or Glacier), Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage (including “Nearline”), Dropbox, OneDrive account, your own SFTP server, or a folder on your NAS.
There’s even an open-source restore tool, so advanced users can use the app’s credentials to access the data directly.
Knowing where your backups are and being able to see the data directly brings peace of mind.
I haven’t decided because this is restrictive. It won’t let me access my files directly from, for example, the Amazon Drive web browser interface.
Next, I found another program GoodSync by Siber Systems which looked promising as it supports PC, Mac and even Linux to run on the Synology drive. But I installed it on the Synology and ran it, and the first thing it asked for is an account for Goodsync. Show stopper in my opinion. I want a long term solution not to rely on logging in to some account.
Continuing on, there is Cloudberry Backup.
They do have a Synology version with a 200 GB limit which I’m trying out. But, it doesn’t register!
I also tried CloudMounter on the Mac. It doesn’t support Amazon Cloud Drive, only Amazon S3.
There are a few more Cloud Drive apps but I don’t have time to test them.
There is also ODRIVE. They say it will work with external storage.
On the Mac
A different approach on the Mac
Cloud Storage Without Using up Local Storage with The New ExpanDrive 3