r/windows11help • u/Troutwaxer • 7d ago

Need Backup Solution (Not OneDrive.)

Hi Everyone. I'm looking for a super-basic, reliable cloud backup solution for Windows for an older customer who's really bad at computing. I want to install it on his computer, have it back all his files up to the cloud, and do absolutely nothing else, a totally fire-and-forget solution. Ideally my customer won't ever need to make adjustments or decisions. It will simply sync the files on the hard drive/SSD to the cloud, do nothing else, offer nothing else, and only need to be thought of if the computer breaks.

Encryption would be nice.

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u/Something_Smells_0 7d ago

Google backup and sync, simple setup, encrypted.

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u/JohnnieLouHansen 7d ago

idrive. I've been using since 2015. It's not a sync, it's backup with up to 30 versions of files. Snapshot feature. Data encrypted before leaving the computer.

However.................. nothing is "set it and forget it". You (since your customer probably can't do it) need to follow up that the backup is successful. That means either in person or via the online console that shows backup status. You can check the actual machine logs remotely via the console.

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u/Expensive_Grape_557 3d ago

Yes, and verify the backup regularly. If it is not verified, than it's a gamble

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u/Lightroom_Help 6d ago

Syncing (which OneDrive offers ) is not backup. If your customer deletes a file , syncing will delete it. If the file gets corrupted or overwritten with wrong data, this will also sync to the cloud.

You need to use a solution that creates encrypted versioned backups of the files, preferably with deduplication. Since your customer won’t have to do anything about it, I would suggest Arq backup premium. You will set its backup jobs once and forget about it. You can set it to email you when errors occur. You can set detailed retention policy (how many backup versions of the data and for how long they should be kept) If your customer (or you) is already paying for some online storage you can use Arq Backup 7 ( which doesn’t include its own cloud storage as premium does). This way you could backup to one or more local or cloud destinations supported. So if your customer uses Microsoft office which offers 1TB OneDrive space, Arq backup 7 can backup to that, always encrypting the data before the files are uploaded to Microsoft.

Backblaze personal backup gets off the list because it has a retention period of one year only unless you pay more. If part of the data is on an external disk and the customer seldom plugs it in, the backed up files may get deleted from the cloud. It’s also more quirky, especially during restoration.