I’ve been using SpiderOAK for the last 2 years after giving up on CrashPlan and I noticed that restores are getting way too slow for my liking to the point of sometimes being faster to just re-create the missing file.
I was wondering if anyone could suggest a backup client that does continuous backup like SpideOAK and CrashPlan but which I can use my own cloud storage.
It needs a GUI and be multiplatform (Mac/PC) because it will be used by family members without much technical background.
I looked at Duplicati and Arq but those only backup at set times (hourly, daily, etc).
Honestly, in your position I would settle with Duplicati. I know you’ve listed it as unviable, but surely hourly jobs would be sufficient? Obviously I don’t know your exact use-case, so perhaps you do need something more continuous
It’s mostly the versioning that I’m after. My wife often has Office apps freezing and corrupting her files, so I’m looking for a solution that minimise how much of her work she looses.
The files are replicated using NextCloud and it does versioning, but you need to use the web interface to recover the versions. The desktop client doesn’t offer this feature.
Oh interesting! I’m not sure how reliable it is, at least from an overall perspective. Personally speaking, I would still prefer to actually backup files elsewhere for versioning, but it’s cool to know that both Windows and macOS have versioning by default
Couldn’t agree more. But with the OS keeping track of versioning you can instruct your backup tool to backup those versioned files, which might open the door to a backup solution that doesn’t support versioning out of the box
I think I’ve tried just about every PC option and don’t have a great answer.
Veeam produces huge files and is too slow (especially when thinning)
Duplicati was unreliable, and kept spiking the CPU on my laptop
SpiderOAK I didn’t like
Arq was OK and I considered it for a while, but features too limited
CrashPlan too expensive now
Acronis OK but a bit like Veeam
iDrive does continuous backup but limited retention options
At the moment I’m still using iDrive. I’m also using Bvckup which is more of a sync program with a “continuous” capability. I sync the files onto a network drive and then linux backs them up using Borg. This actually works pretty well for me (but not cross-platform).
For dual-platform, you might want to consider the venerable Retrospect. I stopped using it when CrashPlan arrived, but the new version supports cloud object storage including private clouds like Minio. It is set-and-forget so it is good for less savvy family members.
I’m curious to hear more about this. Duplicati definitely causes a temporary CPU spike when starting a sync, but other than that it’s been incredibly reliable for me and for many others. How was it unreliable? What platform did you use it on? What storage provider did you backup to?
Windows 7 Enterprise and it was backing up to a few different places including OneDrive, S3 and something on the LAN (it has been a few months, I forget exactly how I set it up). I think the LAN one was causing the problem. The problem mostly occurred after the laptop came out of hibernate. It seemed to not put tasks to sleep properly and dumped a whole bunch of catch-up jobs at once.
I’ll have a look into this. I’ve heard about Mac OS and Office versioning but I’ve never found how it works.
I’m already running Windows 10’s File History to a local NAS, but it only works locally.
And likewise I’d still prefer the versioning backed up externally elsewhere.
The daily backups are already covered. They run from the clients locally (using CCC on Mac and FreeFileSync on PC) to the NAS and from there to multiple storage VPS using borg.
System images are also covered on Mac using Time Machine and on PCs using AOMEI Backupper.
If it’s mostly for backing up documents, etc then I’d say look at a sync solution as well. Syncthing with file versioning, Resilio sync, etc for self-hosted. Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc for hosted. Sync working folders across multiple machines and turn on file versioning so you can roll back if something gets corrupted.
They are already syncing with NextCloud, but its client doesn’t give access to the versions. If you need to recover a version you need to login via web.
Obviously you access it via the web interface, but this is run locally.
