I really like Time Machine for local backups, but I'd also like to have a cloud backup of everything on my local disk. What's the best way to get full, versioned incremental backups of my machine, to the cloud?
The obvious solutions do not fulfil this seemingly simple goal:
-
BackBlaze is convenient and works well but doesn't back up anything outside of
/Users/—and even then has undocumented exclusions such as not backing up empty directories, symlinks, etc. -
iDrive also has various (but at least better documented) mandatory exclusions including
/Systemand/etc. They advertise disk image backups, but this is a Windows-only feature; when I contacted iDrive support they suggested I use the iDrive app to backup my local Time Machine drive. That would work but means I have to carry around an extra hard drive (or NAS box!) just to do cloud backups, which is lame. (iDrive is also a resource hog, making my system unusably slow when it is running, even when it's not saturating the network connection.)
Ideally I'd just like to configure TimeMachine to backup to a cloud-provided network share, but I suspect that this might be terribly slow (and prone to corruption due to network disconnects) even if I could find a provider offering SMB-mountable cloud storage.
Is there a solution that provides Time Machine levels of convenience and protection without needing a local disk?
Best Answer
CrashPlan (here) or self-host and use Arq (here).