OneDrive is a decent solution for non-techies who need a backup system. I’ve installed it for octogenarians who certainly would never backup anything on their own. It does versioning on the files, so it can protect against ransomware and provide fallback to earlier versions.
Whenever I am remotely helping one of the people I have it setup for, I glance at the icon to see if it is working. Occasionally, I see it complaining about a single file not syncing for some reason, but that generally will resolve itself by the next time I check.
It has a vault that requires additional authentication for your most sensitive files.
I like it—I’m sure its not perfect, but it isn’t terrible.
Check that again. OneDrive is not a backup application, it is a cloud storage application. By default it syncs folders. If you open OneDrive on the web and delete a file there, it will be deleted on the computer on your drive. It’s not backing up your folder, it is replacing it. The internet is filled with testimonies of people failing to understand this basic difference and getting confused about why their files are deleted. Most other cloud services do one way backup by default. MS does a poor job of explaining this behavior and just push for the use of OneDrive blindly.
These seem like semantics to me. Saying it isn’t a backup, when it successfully restored my uncle’s 25 years of files after his hard drive failed, doesn’t ring true to me. OneDrive allows recovery of data from ransomware, common user error like deleting or overwriting files, drive failure and catastrophe like fire. What use cases does this backup methodology lack for you that is important for casual end users?
Personally, I architected datacenter backups for a large company with business critical data. This was a decade ago, but even then I was responsible for architecting logical, physical, application, database, snapshot, tape and site replication for about a petabyte of data (hard drives used to be small). When you say that some of those things are not backup, I don’t understand why you think that? Different types of backups have different strengths, weaknesses and use cases.
OneDrive is a decent solution for non-techies who need a backup system. I’ve installed it for octogenarians who certainly would never backup anything on their own. It does versioning on the files, so it can protect against ransomware and provide fallback to earlier versions.
Whenever I am remotely helping one of the people I have it setup for, I glance at the icon to see if it is working. Occasionally, I see it complaining about a single file not syncing for some reason, but that generally will resolve itself by the next time I check.
It has a vault that requires additional authentication for your most sensitive files.
I like it—I’m sure its not perfect, but it isn’t terrible.
Check that again. OneDrive is not a backup application, it is a cloud storage application. By default it syncs folders. If you open OneDrive on the web and delete a file there, it will be deleted on the computer on your drive. It’s not backing up your folder, it is replacing it. The internet is filled with testimonies of people failing to understand this basic difference and getting confused about why their files are deleted. Most other cloud services do one way backup by default. MS does a poor job of explaining this behavior and just push for the use of OneDrive blindly.
These seem like semantics to me. Saying it isn’t a backup, when it successfully restored my uncle’s 25 years of files after his hard drive failed, doesn’t ring true to me. OneDrive allows recovery of data from ransomware, common user error like deleting or overwriting files, drive failure and catastrophe like fire. What use cases does this backup methodology lack for you that is important for casual end users?
Personally, I architected datacenter backups for a large company with business critical data. This was a decade ago, but even then I was responsible for architecting logical, physical, application, database, snapshot, tape and site replication for about a petabyte of data (hard drives used to be small). When you say that some of those things are not backup, I don’t understand why you think that? Different types of backups have different strengths, weaknesses and use cases.