Best Overall
iDrive Personal
IDrive is best for anyone who has multiple machines to back up. Just keep an eye on the 2TB or 5TB storage limit.
Best ValuePicking the best online backup service requires looking beyond the obvious feature of copying files from your computer to the cloud and back again. First, I looked strictly at services that offered a ready-made, easy-to-use combination of backup app and cloud storage. If so, you can use Dropbox to back up your Mac. However, cloud folder sync is not the same as cloud backup. If you accidentally delete a file from your local computer, folder sync will also delete the file in the cloud, which defeats the purpose of backup.
Backblaze
Backblaze is cheap, simple, fast and easy to use. But you might want to shop around if you have multiple machines to back up.
Best for Power UsersAcronis True Image
Acronis True Image is expensive and complicated, but it offers a wide range of options and features for hard-core PC users.
You may regularly back up your computer's data to an external hard drive — and if not, you should — but that really won't be enough. Both your PC and your local backup drive could be lost at the same time to theft, flood or fire.
Cloud-backup services, also known as online-backup services, help you avoid such data disasters. They copy your valuable information to an offsite repository that never goes offline and is available from anywhere, preventing total catastrophe.
Based on more than 40 hours of testing, our top pick among cloud-backup services is IDrive ($13.90 for the first year for Tom's Guide readers), which backs up an unlimited number of PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets for a reasonable price. IDrive is the best choice if you have multiple computers and phones to back up.
Our value pick is the very user-friendly Backblaze, which gives you unlimited storage space for just $60 per year, but backs up only one machine (and an attached external drive) per account. Backblaze is the best choice if you have a single computer and just want to back it up without worrying about the details.
News and updates
— Backblaze has opened a new data center, aka server farm, in Amsterdam, the company's first data center outside of the United States. From now on, customers creating new Backblaze accounts can choose whether the data is stored in the 'US West' (Sacramento and Phoenix) or 'EU Central' regions. That selection will be permanent.
— Acronis has updated its True Image software to the 2020 version, adding a feature that can back up data to both the Acronis cloud and your local storage drive simultaneously to make sure your backups are never out of sync. The new software also has better power and Wi-Fi network management for laptop backups.
— Backblaze has updated its desktop software to version 6.1, bringing some speed boosts to both Windows and Mac clients.
How we tested and rated
We took into consideration several factors: storage costs, ease of file restoration, computer-resource usage, unique features and ease of use and of installation. Upload speed also matters, because while your initial backup happens only once, the backup can take days or even weeks if it's several hundred gigabytes.
We give bonus points to those online-backup services that let you mail in a hard drive full of data to start the process or send you one to restore your data.
Our testing and evaluating was done on a 2017 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro booting into Windows 10. Mobile apps were run on a Google Pixel XL 2 running Android 8.1 Oreo. We monitored which quickly creates a bootable file-restoration tool. The downsides are that Acronis can get expensive, has a confusing pricing structure and doesn't back up external or networked drives.
Other backup services reviewed
Carbonite Safe
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of devices: Up to 5 computers, but no volume discount | Storage limit: Unlimited | External drive backups: Not with basic plan | Mobile device backups: No | System and application backups: No | Two factor authentication: Yes | Drive shipping: Restore only
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Carbonite says it offers unlimited storage, but you'd better read the fine print, as it doesn't automatically back up large files, external drives, or any kind of video file, on its lowest pricing tier. To get those functions, you'll have to trade up to the point where Carbonite Safe is no longer competitive. Multiple machines are supported on a single account, but each costs as much as the first. On the plus side, the software is attractive and easy to use.
SpiderOak One
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of devices: Unlimited | Storage limit: 5TB | External drive backups: Yes | Mobile device backups: No | System and application backups: Yes, but not by default | Two factor authentication: Only for legacy users | Drive shipping: No
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
What Is The Best Online Backup For Mac
SpiderOak One Backup 2 TBSpiderOak was the first online-backup (or online-syncing) service to make sure the customer held a private, exclusive encryption key. Most other online-backup services now offer the same thing, but SpiderOak also has strong file-sharing and -syncing features, as well as support for unlimited machines and, if you insist, backups of system files and applications. Yet SpiderOak's storage-space pricing is so high that it's more competitive with Dropbox than it is with IDrive, and while its file-restoration speed was amazingly fast, its initial upload speed was glacial.
Zoolz Cloud Backup
SPECIFICATIONS
Number of devices: Up to 5 computers, but only 1 per user | Storage limit: 4TB | External drive backups: Yes | Mobile device backups: No | System and application backups: Yes, but not by default | Two factor authentication: No | Drive shipping: No
Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid
Zoolz has a lot of features and an attractive, easy-to-use interface. The service permits multiuser accounts, lets you back up applications and system files and, at least at the time of this writing, is appealingly priced. But its Achilles' heel is that the Zoolz storage servers are just rented space on Amazon's Glacier cloud service, which is agonizingly slow to access. It doesn't help that the Zoolz mobile apps are next to useless.
Online backup vs. online syncing vs. online storage
Cloud-backup services aren't the same as online-syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive. An online-syncing service creates a cloud-based mirror of a specific set of files or folders on your device, and pushes out identical copies of those files to all of your linked devices so that you can have immediate access to them.
Cloud-backup services are simpler. They continuously or periodically copy all or most of the files and folders on your computer to their own cloud servers. Your data stays on those servers until you need it, and with luck, you never will. Most cloud-backup services offer generous amounts of storage for a subscription fee that is much cheaper, gigabyte for gigabyte, than an online-syncing service.
Cheapest of all are cloud-storage services such as Box or Google Cloud. These let you offload files you don't immediately need to online servers, freeing up space on your hard drive. These can be dirt-cheap, sometimes as little as a few pennies per month per gigabyte, but there's often a fee to download files again. (The assumption is that you will never need to download all the files.) Backblaze has its own very affordable cloud-storage service called B2.
Encryption and differences
Online Backup For Mac
All of the cloud-backup services we tested in 2018 — Acronis True Image, Backblaze, Carbonite Safe, IDrive Personal, SpiderOak One and Zoolz Cloud Backup — protect your data with industry-standard encryption. They also let you encrypt your data yourself with your own private key before uploading the data, although only SpiderOak makes this the default option. (But if you lose your private key, the cloud-backup service can't recover your data.)
Otherwise, cloud-backup services can vary greatly. Some let you back up system files and applications, some back up smartphones and tablets as well as hard drives, some provide software to back up to a local drive, some let you share files with other people, and some even provide file-syncing or dead-storage functions.
What Is The Best Online Dating Site
But while a couple of online-backup services let you back up an unlimited number of devices, and a few others give you unlimited online storage space, none gives you unlimited space for unlimited devices.