'Best' cloud storage backend in 2025

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#1

Hi,

I am pleasantly surprised with the choice of cloud backends, but that also makes it hard to choose. From what I have read in the older posts here so far, it is not very wise to go with cloud drives like OneDrive, Google Drive etc. I also read some negative comments on iDrive e2, but those comments were (also) quite dated. B2 is ok. AWS S3 only supports standard which is quite pricy, but that comment also is quite dated.

So, for around 3 to 4TB of data what would you suggest to use as a cloud backend and why?

FYI, I am currently on Crashplan so speed is not an issue :sleepy:

Thanks for your input.

#2

There is no one-size-fits-all really.

Depends on what data you backup (few large or many small files, with corresponding choice of chunk size), how often and how much of that data changes, how much do you expect to restore annually, whether performance is important, etc.

Fully agree.

The company did not change its business model. Their incentives are misaligned with that of their users. All critique is still applies. It’s in the race to the bottom. Don’t use such companies.

Debatable. I would not trust them either based on past history. Also see previous comment, it applies to them as well.

This is not accurate. Duplicacy supports all storage tiers except glacier subsets that require thawing. For example, GlacierInstant Retrieval work — but makes no financial sense. You can use Google archive tier — but need to be careful with minimum retention charge.

That’s why it’s hard to give a blanket recommendation without knowing specifics.

If I had to give a default recommendation: for a reasonably priced, with good track record, excellent performance, geo-redundancy, scalability, and right priorities alignment hot/nearline storage for active backup today I would (and did) pick STORJ. Depending on your network setup — native integration, or if upstream or CPU performance is an issue — their S3 gateway.

Whoa. Did not realize they are still around. That’s been a while!

#3

Personally I’ve found Hetzner’s storage boxes to be pretty good in terms of pricing, especially since it’s a fixed price. The downside is that I’m in the US and the storage boxes are in Europe (Germany or Finland) and as a result I only get about 100 mbit/s both ways.

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#4

@saspus My backup reports from Carshplan go back to 2010, but I probably have it longer than that. The other day I decided I wanted a SATA SSD for my backup. I decided that instead of copying the current backup archive I wanted to create a new archive. No problem to start that up in Crashplan. Just add a Destination, tell them what the sources are and off you go… at a whopping speed of at best 10MB/sec, but more likely 5MB/sec :face_with_symbols_over_mouth: Which is pretty amazing when you make a backup from one SSD to another. I logged a ticket with Crashplan over a month ago and they are still ‘analyzing’ and telling me that 20Mbps (that’s megabit) is ‘fairly fast’.

My first attempt was iDrive as I had read a good review on Macworld. Pretty fast both local and cloud backup. But when I wanted to test their restore function with my local backup I found out that iDrive doesn’t support versions on Mac, so you can only restore from your last backup. When I asked about it they called versioning an interesting feature request that would pass on to development for review. Exit iDrive…

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#5

Interesting solution and fortunately I am based in Europe. Are you using SFTP to access? How does the connection time fee work out for you? Is that only being charged when you backup/restore etc.?

#6

I’m using SFTP, and there’s no fee for bandwidth

#7

Little update to this, I managed to overcome the 100 mbit/s issue by using WebDAV instead of SFTP and setting up a VPN server on a cloud server in the same region and using that as a relay to the storage box. I’m able to get about 50 MB/s that way at peak

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#8

That’s a pretty attractive offer, if you manage to use amount of storage close to the allocation, which is very hard to do. Generally, I’d avoid providers that charge fixed fee regardless of whether you use that space or not.

#9

I am using almost all of it, so that’s proven quite nice

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