Cloud backup solution for cloud storage?

I Have a Question
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1

I have a 512GB Mac.
I use odrive and Amazon Cloud Drive to store roughly 1.5TB of images and files.
I have a 2TB Time Machine external hard drive.

Using a backup program like CrashPlan, Backblaze, etc isn’t going to backup placeholder files (or if it did it wouldn’t benefit me any if I tried to restore from a backup).

In the event Amazon has a fluke (I know, super unlikely), or someone hacks into my Amazon account and somehow trashes stuff, or I’m not thinking straight one day and click “delete” and “yes, I’m sure to delete it from the cloud too” and then then next day I regret it…

My thought is to do something like a “rolling sync” – basically tell the backup program to ignore .cloud (file) and .cloudf (folder) files and then sync down everything but not all at once and not to 100% capacity on my hard drive.

This way the backup program will back it up, then odrive unsyncs it, then odrive syncs the next batch (say 100GB worth) for a week, then backup backs it up, then unsync, then sync down the next 100GB, etc.

Even Time Machine, not just something like CrashPlan.

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Alternatively, maybe even a better idea… anyone know of a backup service that’ll take cloud storage and back it up (including versioning), like Amazon Cloud Drive to CrashPlan, Backblaze, even Dropbox, et. al. without needing to be on my computer first?

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Typing all this out, I’m guessing this (or something close to it) will end up being the correct answer:

  1. add a second external hard drive
  2. tell odrive (or maybe even native Amazon Cloud Drive app?) to sync all of Amazon Cloud Drive there (never use placeholder files)
  3. tell CrashPlan to backup that external hard drive

… but my workflow is still to use odrive on my internal drive (with the great placeholder files feature) and I’ll open and edit files from there and then it’ll sync back to my external drive when I reconnect to it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and helping me!

2

Hi @cliffordmpaulick,
You could certainly perform a staged backup, where you bring your data down from amazon in stages, allow the backup program to back that data up, then unsync. Once done then you should be able to work normally out of odrive and the backup application will do its thing in the background. As you said, you should have the backup app exclude .cloud* files.

3

If I have 4 folders:

  • Work (1TB)
  • Personal (200GB)
  • Photos (500GB)
  • Other (10GB)

and I don’t have a clue how large each of those folders are (i.e. I don’t know the GB in parentheses), I’m hesitant to right click Sync All on one of them. If I only have 150GB of free space on my internal drive and I click to sync a 1TB or 200GB or 500GB folder, what happens?

Is there a better way to go about doing this? I feel like I’ll always be in the dark when clicking Sync and then just hoping it’ll turn out okay.

4

Hi @cliffordmpaulick,

It will sync until it runs out of space on the drive, then stop.

For the initial backup, you could opt to spin-up an instance on a provider like Azure, AWS, or Google and download everything there, then backup. This is obviously an advanced option, but you should be able to get things done much quicker and have the resources available take care of concerns about storage or network.