The four other online backup services that made my cut based on price and must-have features are all reasonably good but lacking in one or more ways that Backblaze and IDrive are not.
| Service |
Acronis True Image 2018 |
Backblaze |
ElephantDrive |
IDrive Online Backup |
Carbonite |
Zoolz Cloud Archive for Home |
| Price for one year |
$100 |
$50 |
$120 |
$70* |
$60 |
$70* |
| Storage at above price |
1 TB |
Unlimited |
1 TB |
2 TB |
Unlimited |
1 TB* |
| Computers covered at above price |
1 |
1 |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
1 |
5* |
| Cost for 1 TB per month |
$8 |
$4 |
$10 |
$6 |
$5 |
$6 |
| Family/group plan cost |
$150/year (3 computers) or $160/year (5 computers) |
N/A |
See note |
N/A |
N/A |
$250* |
| Family/group plan storage |
1 TB |
N/A |
See note |
N/A |
N/A |
4 TB* |
| Family/group plan computers covered |
3 or 5 |
N/A |
See note |
N/A |
N/A |
5 |
| Versioning |
20 versions |
Unlimited |
Unlimited |
10 versions |
Windows only |
Unlimited |
| Encryption |
AES-256 |
AES-128 + public/private key |
AES-256 |
AES-256 |
128-bit Blowfish |
AES-256 |
| External drive as source |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Windows HomePlus plan ($80/year) or better only |
Yes |
| Network drive/NAS as source |
Mapped network volumes only |
No |
NAS devices only |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| External drive as destination |
Yes |
No |
No |
Yes |
Windows HomePlus plan ($80/year) or better only |
Yes* |
| Personal encryption key |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Windows Only |
Yes |
| Folder syncing |
Windows only |
No |
Yes |
Yes* |
Yes |
No |
| File sharing |
No |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Retention of deleted files/old versions |
Indefinite (user preference) |
4 weeks |
Indefinite (user preference) |
Indefinite* |
30 days |
Indefinite |
| Deduplication |
No |
Client-side, block-level |
Client-side, file-level |
No |
No |
Client-side, block-level |
| Seeding |
No |
No |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
| In-place restoration |
Yes |
No |
No |
Manual |
Yes |
Yes |
| Physical restore media |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
Available only with Prime plan for Windows ($150/year), and costs $120 |
No |
| Continuous backups |
No |
Sorta |
Yes |
Yes, for files under 500 MB |
No |
No |
| Scheduling interval |
Minimum once per hour |
Automatic on file change, once per day, or manual |
Automatic on file change, once per day, once per week, or once per month |
Automatic on file change or minimum once per day |
Minimum once per day |
Minimum once per 12 hours |
| Throughput (default settings, Mbps) |
25.35 |
19.58 |
18.87 |
27.1 |
4.64 |
16.83 |
| Throughput (customized settings, Mbps) |
19.82* |
22.4 |
18.87 |
27.1 |
— |
16.83 |
| Native Mac/Windows apps |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
| Notes |
Premium subscription details shown here. One-time purchase, no storage: $50. One-year Advanced subscription, 250 GB: $50.*Default = Optimal setting; customized = Maximum setting. Oddly, Maximum was much slower than Optimal in my tests. |
— |
Paid accounts permit you to back up an unlimited number of devices and also set up three sub-accounts.ElephantDrive uses a Java app. |
*Price: Discount offered for first year. IDrive also offers a $100 per year, 5 TB plan.*Sync: Uses separate storage space.*Retention: User-specified pruning is optional. |
Claims upload speeds of up to 10 Mbps. |
*Price and storage: $70 per year for Family plan (1 TB); $250 per year for Heavy plan (4 TB). Promotional prices are currently $40 and $100, respectively.*External drive: Local storage can be used only in addition to cloud backup. |
Acronis True Image 2018 offers a one-year subscription with 1 TB of storage for $100; you can also choose a less-expensive plan with only 250 GB of storage. True Image selects the whole drive by default, backing up every single file on your disk, so you could restore your entire drive if you wish—but that’s a process I wouldn’t attempt while using a broadband connection with a data cap. (I recommend clicking Change Source to manually choose what to back up.) Oddly, encryption is not enabled by default, but you can easily turn it on before starting a backup. True Image offers a personal encryption key, versioning (up to 20 versions), indefinite retention (user-configurable), delta updates, and in-place restoration, all of which are good things. It also lets you select external drives, including mapped network drives, as either the source or the destination.
In my tests, with True Image’s default network settings, throughput was a speedy 25.35 Mbps—the second-fastest result after IDrive. But when I changed the data-upload speed from Optimal to Maximum, throughput inexplicably dropped to only 19.82 Mbps. I repeated the test several times to confirm this finding, and the Maximum setting was always slower for me.
However, True Image runs only on a schedule, not automatically when files change, with a maximum frequency of once per hour (and a default of once per day). It does not perform deduplication, which means you may waste time and storage space backing up identical or near-identical files. And the service offers no option to seed a backup by sending in a hard drive, or to receive backed-up files on physical media. Folder syncing across devices is an option, but only for Windows users.
The Windows version of Carbonite ranks far ahead of the Mac version. Windows users get versioning and a personal-key option; they can also choose higher-priced Plus and Prime plans with more features, such as the options to back up external hard drives and receive restored files on physical media. But those higher-priced plans make Carbonite considerably more expensive than Backblaze, and Carbonite still provides only 30-day file retention, a maximum backup frequency of once per day, and no seeding option. You must also manually select all the files and folders to back up. And although the company says that it no longer throttles the connection after backups reach a certain total size, and that it offers “upload speeds of up to 10 Mbps” (which is to say, the speed is artificially restricted on the server side), the maximum throughput I saw in my tests was only half that, at 4.64 Mbps.
The Windows version of Carbonite lets you use a personal encryption key; you can select the option during setup or after the fact (as shown here). Mac users don’t have this option.
ElephantDrive recently increased its storage-space options such that you can now get 1 TB of storage for $10 per month (previously, $10 per month got you only 100 GB), and it offers both versioning and a personal-key option, so I tested the service for the June 2017 update to this guide. ElephantDrive requires Java, so you see a prompt to install Java if it’s not already present on your computer. Unfortunately, like many Java apps, ElephantDrive has an awkward interface, and because ElephantDrive requires a standard Java installation, it subjects your computer to unnecessary security risks. ElephantDrive backs up your Desktop, Music, and Pictures folders by default (not your entire Home folder), but you can make changes to the selection before the backup runs.
Finally, two other issues make this service far less attractive than Backblaze or IDrive. First, ElephantDrive offers deduplication but not delta updates—make even a tiny change to a file, and it uploads the whole thing again, wasting time, bandwidth, and storage space. Second, although the app offers versioning, the interface makes seeing and restoring older file versions unnecessarily cumbersome. On the plus side, in my tests its measured throughput was a healthy 18.87 Mbps, at which rate you could back up about 212 GB per day; the company also has a version of ElephantDrive that runs on many NAS devices, giving you a good way to back them up to the cloud.
I had a hard time getting past the awkward and unintuitive interface of Zoolz Cloud Archive for Home. Once I figured it out and manually added the folders I wanted to back up, I tested throughput at a respectable 16.83 Mbps. However, none of the settings I tried that were supposed to improve throughput—including Turbo mode and multi-threaded uploads—improved that figure. Zoolz backs up your files a maximum of once every 12 hours, which is far too infrequent. And the restoration process is by far the most confusing I’ve ever seen: You have to launch a separate app to restore files, and although you can restore them in place, finding the ones you want is unreasonably hard. The display doesn’t even distinguish files from folders except by color, and it doesn’t offer a hierarchical or tree display—you must double-click folders endlessly to drill down to the file you want, and repeat for each additional thing you want to restore. Zoolz offers 1 TB of storage for $10 per month, though multiple computers can share that space.
We also tested SOS Online Backup for a previous update to this guide; at the time, it met our criteria for inclusion. Since then, the company has changed its pricing, and the service no longer comes close to offering at least 1 terabyte of storage for less than $10 per month. We tested it only as a Windows option, as the service has no personal-key option for Mac.
Finally, a few words about some well-known online backup services I didn’t test because they failed to make my cut for one reason or another:
- Depositit: Prices start at £10 (about $16) per month for 3 GB.
- DollyDrive: This service starts at $5 per month for 500 GB and offers 1 TB for $10 per month (the company also offers a plan with unlimited storage for a single computer for $6 per month), but it’s Mac-only.
- IBackup: When I initially researched the field of services, I dismissed IBackup because it offered only 10 GB of storage for $10 per month, well below my requirement of 1 TB; in addition, I came across a good number of terrible customer reviews. The company later increased storage to 1 TB for the same $10 per month, bringing it in line with the other services in my final list, and I made a note to investigate it further. On my most recent examination, however, the company was back to charging $10 per month for only 10 GB, with a “limited-time” promotion of $10 per month for 500 GB or $20 per month for 1,000 GB. With or without the promotion, it didn’t meet my price cutoff.
- JustCloud: The last service I cut from contention, JustCloud charged almost $260 for two years (just over $10 per month) for 1 TB of storage at the time of my research, but it didn’t offer a personal-key option.
- Livedrive: Although the price—$8 per month for unlimited backups from one computer—isn’t too bad, neither the site nor its software makes any mention of a personal-key option. And all the servers appear to be located in the UK, which is likely to mean slower performance for people in North America.
- Memopal: A price of €79 per year (about $90) gets you only 500 GB of storage.
- MozyHome: Mozy charges $6 per month for just 50 GB of storage from one computer, or $10 per month for 125 GB of storage from up to three computers.
- Norton Online Backup: A fee of $50 per year gets you 25 GB of storage for up to five computers.
- Rhinoback: This service offers 20 GB for $50 per month; 1 TB costs an astonishing $1,300 per month.
- SpiderOak One: Although I like everything about SpiderOak One’s security and privacy offerings—private keys are the only option—this service is just outside my price-range cutoff, at $12 per month for 1 TB. It offers syncing across devices but otherwise has little to recommend it over Backblaze.
- SugarSync: Just 250 GB of storage costs $10 per month.