online backup – idrive ?

Seems my family is incapable of backing up reliably to any of the “solutions” 🙄 I’ve provided in the past

Thinking we need an online answer, esp now that the kids are living away and me talking them through finding stuff on their laptops is a ballache.  Bit of searching SUGGESTS that idrive is quite well regarded and can accept multiple devices (and is remarkably cheap for year 1 so at least we can see if it gets used properly

Questions, then:
Phones – rest of  family use iphones and I’m android.  I don’t care about backing up mine and I *THINK* that apple already backs up their stuff.  Or a meringue ?  (I’d rather not bother as I can imagine thousands of shite photos clogging the thing up)
iDrive is not Apple, right (or more importantly will work with windows and iphones – if answer above is that iphones aren’t backed up by apple)?
Anyone know if “multiple devices” has a meaningful limit (esp in the case of phones) or is it just “x”TB of space, accessed however we choose?
If anyone uses it, is it feasible to make separate folders within the idrive backup that each of use can use separately?  (I don’t care about us seeing each other’s stuff but do care that somebody might wipe all my shit without me knowing
Is it likely clever enough to only back up selected folders from PCs?

Err, have I missed anything ?

and I *THINK* that apple already backs up their stuff

only if you configure it and if you have a lot of stuff, you have to subscribe to get more storage (it’s very cheap, I pay £1.79 a month for something like 250 Gbytes).

ta footflaps, I doubt they have more than that but as you say, that’s pretty cheap anyway

I’m ignoring the phones aspect then

Imagine my surprise on RTFM:

By default, IDrive creates a unique folder with the name of the computer to prevent data overlap during multiple computers backup

another box ticked then !

Is it likely clever enough to only back up selected folders from PCs?

These things normally either have a dedicated backup folder or just backup the dedicated user file area, so if you save stuff outside of those areas it won’t be covered.

You can use OneDrive to backup Documents, Pictures and the Desktop folders (or any combination of the three) on a Windows machine and it’s free up to 25Gb each (I think). If you pay for Office by subscription then you get 1TB. You can obviously also sync the OneDrive folder and keep everything in there if you don’t want to copy the known folders.

Office for up to 6 people with 6TB storage (1TB each) is £79 a year…

I use OneDrive and just moved our “My Documents” folders into the OneDrive folder. Works well and gets all of you Office to install.

It’s not a true backup, it’s online storage, but works well for me.

Don’t pay full price, but it from somewhere like here https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8837505

And when you get near the end of your year look out for another offer.

Don’t pay full price

Yep, I normally pay around £45 a year for Office 365 family….

Yep, I normally pay around £45 a year for Office 365 family….

This just prompted me to renew mine, £49 from Amazon for another 15 months so I’m paid up until August 2024.

I use OneDrive and just moved our “My Documents” folders into the OneDrive folder. Works well and gets all of you Office to install.

It’s not a true backup, it’s online storage, but works well for me.

If you go to the OneDrive settings, accessed via the client in the taskbar, you can set it to  “backup” the known folders “My Documents, Pictures and Desktop”. That is in addition to having the One Drive folder itself accessible via Windows Explorer.  That way they are separate and also you keep offline copies.

I use idrive and its OK, don’t pay full price though I change email address every year and usually get a $9.99 offer or less by email.

I’ve been using iDrive for a couple of years now. The initial upload takes a while (unsurprisingly given almost 1TB for my laptop) but after that the incremental backups just carry on in the background. We have multiple computers on the same account – I can’t remember what it costs but it was much cheaper than Backblaze which I was using previously. However, judging by this review that may not still be the case

https://www.techradar.com/best/best-cloud-backup

If you have the storage sorted with Apple and the backup setting switched on an iPhone should just back itself up automatically whenever it is on charge and the screen is locked

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211228