Onedrive as storage?

Support
#1

Hi, up until now I’ve been considering using either storj (or backblaze) as my cloud storage.

I recently discovered my work provides me with 1TB onedrive business space (and I could request for more).

Has anyone experience of using onedrive for duplicacy storage?

I normally steer clear of anything to do with MS. And find the whole ondrive experience clunky and seemingly slow (web interface anyway). Though given it’s free storage, may be worth using it?

Completely new: where to start
#2

Nothing free is ever worth it. Separately, using drive services for bulk storage is a bad idea due to misalignment of incentives.

That said you can search the forum for anecdotal experience.

In a nutshell — you will be able to only use one or two threads before throttling, performance will be subpar, and in the past OneDrive for business had nasty bugs in their api (also search forum). At this stage of product maturity that is unacceptable.

You are right, last 10 years Microsoft is rapidly accelerating downhill across the board.

I would stay clear. Your savory is more important than illusory few bucks you will save until the fist failure that will consume way more in your time.

My $.02.

#3

First time poster. Thank you for this wonderful backup sw

I use OneDrive for my backups and have not had any problems in the 2yrs that I’ve been using it. Backups are relatively fast considering they run on an arm64 SBC and pulls data to be backed up over NFS. Weekly backups (9 backup jobs, 1 schedule, ~7-10GB per week to be uploaded) usually take 35mins including the check job at the end of the schedule. I pick 2 random folders and perform a restore once a month to ensure my backups are valid and have not had any problems so far compared to other backup sw I’ve used in the past. Not sure about the Business plan though

But I will not dispute @saspus’ claim. After all this borders around the category of “acceptable use policy”. I have a M365 Family subscription that I share with others bringing down my cost so the incentive to use it over paying for another service is quite high. Having said that, I follow a 4-2-2 backup rule so I feel somewhat more confident about being able to recover from a disastrous HW failure even if OneDrive gives me “problems” regarding acceptable use policy

Sidenote: @saspus I’m a happy user of your Duplicacy container image in my kubernetes cluster at home. Thank you!

#4

It’s literally not free if his work is paying for it. Maybe it’s free for him, but that’s incidental. Still, not. free.

@snowcrash101 Try it out and let us know (add to the pool of real world experience) - but indeed combine it with B2/Storj/whatever, as @lrdshaper suggests, and test your backups.

#5

He/she (rightfully) would not pay for it him/herself, see the fourth paragraph in the original post. He/she is only considering to use it because it’s free for him/her. My statement is very much applicable.

#6

Few thoughts:

  • I’ve used it before, and backing up to it was fine/fast
  • Restoring from it is slow, and somewhat error prone (maxed out at 2MB/s in the same region, and blocks detected as corrupted which required manually clearing local caches before they were able to be download again successfully)
  • When you leave the job you’ll have to extract + move all that. May be a bit of a process. What happens if you get fired + access cut off? You won’t have any time to retrieve that

Depends on your data set but I’d suggest using something more “suited” for that purpose. Say B2, Wasabi, rsync.net - don’t tie up your personal backups with your employment status.