Reliable backup drive?

[thedave1164]

The portable storage is not a backup, it is a copy.

You should have several copies stored at different locations for important data.

A cloud provider like BackBlaze.com has redundant systems that are a pretty safe bet for your data.

A copy is not a backup, and I don’t consider data backed up properly if I don’t have 3 different ways to restore it.

[brutal]

I'm reviewing some backup drives on Amazon and all of them seem to have complaints of lost data, slow operation, poor customer service, etc.

So I'm now thinking maybe going to an off-site backup would be a good idea. So how does One Drive work? I basically get a subscription and then I can set it up as another drive on my computer and just transfer files to and from that drive?

What I'm asking here is whether I have to run some "backup/Restore" software every time I want to upload/download, or whether I can just use it as another drive, meaning that if I can't find one specific file, I can go onto my "cloud drive" and find the backup of that file, is that correct?

In our case, it's likely to be mostly photos. At this point I'm sure we have well over a TB of photos each. Obviously 99% of them are probably worthless but the 1% (growing kids, special moments, etc) are worth spending some money to keep safe.

Besides Microsoft, what other "cloud" backup services are available to a casual (home) user (as opposed to a business?)

OneDrive is just a folder on your computer. The location (I think) defaults to your My Documents, but can be specified/moved.

I actually have my OneDrive folder on a separate drive from my Windows OS.

I moved all my important folders to the OneDrive folder. OneDrive runs as a background service and is always syncing files to the cloud location which is accessible from any device any time.

In addition, you get to download and use all the basic Office365 Apps.

There are additional safeguards you can take to make redundant copies of the data. I also use a file sync utility to also store the really critical files located in OneDrive in other locations.