Experiences with OneDrive as a backup target

Now that my local backups are all setup with Duplicati, I’m moving on to making my cloud backups.

Has anyone used OneDrive for their Duplicati cloud backups? If so, I would be interested in how it worked out for you.

The consumer plan is priced at $99/year for 5 logins. Each login gets 1 TB of storage, for a total of 5 TB across the 5 logins. It seems like a pretty amazing plan.

Any feedback on performance, reliability or other perspectives would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Marc

Update, 9/24/2017
I am going to net-out my experiences so that others don’t have to read the entire thread to get the scoop. I am still in the final stages of testing, so I will make it clear when it is “final”:

  • I purchased the $99/year Home Office 365 plan which gives you 5 logins, each with 1 TB of storage. It also gives you 5 licenses for the installed office suite.
  • My backup set is 241GB of source data that compresses to 147GB of backup data.
  • If you have recently purchased a storage plan that is larger than the free plan (currently 5GB), wait until it shows that you have access to all of your purchased storage at onedrive.live.com. It can take 10s of minutes from time of purchase until the system recognizes that you have access to more storage. If you start the upload before this happens, you will be cutoff with a warning that you are violating the terms of service once you hit the free plan limit (5GB in my case.)
  • My internet plan with my ISP is limited to 6mbits/sec of upload speed and this is the speed I am consistently uploading at, so it appears that Microsoft Onedrive supports a minimum of 6mbits/sec upload speed without throttling.
  • A more in-depth performance assessment can be found in @JonMikelV’s excellent thread titled Benchmarking different storage providers. OneDrive did well in his tests.
  • If have confirmed that verifications and restores work with OneDrive…

Did you check out this Topic yet?

Hi Marc,

As mentioned by Jon, I am doing some benchmarking on OneDrive. It is a top tier performer amongst the services I have have access to and testing around.

For the consumer plan you mentioned, is that the one bundled with the MS Office Family pack subscription. Certainly would be a great deal if can get MS Office for five computers as well as 5 different 1Tb storage plans as well…

@JonMikelV, good point – that thread does address the question on performance. Still interested in perspectives on reliability.

I have a friend who experienced data loss on OneDrive when the sync operation went sideways and started deleting everything on all of the sync’ed machines.This was several years ago so they may have fixed it by now, and even if they have not, I’d use a dedicated account for backups that isn’t synced anywhere, so it wouldn’t be an issue for me. Having said this, it would be comforting to hear that someone has been using OneDrive with Duplicati without problems.

@Kelly_Trinh, yes – that is the plan I am looking at. It does look like a killer deal!

Marc

That is exactly the plan I have started using with Duplicati. By coincidence I needed to renew my 365 family subscription just as I was looking for a replacement to my home CrashPlan backup. It does seem a bargain - either 365 and free backup or backup with free 365 depending on your preference. 1Tb backup per machine is enough for my needs.

I started my trial subscription, created a separate account for doing backups, starting my 150GB backup and went to sleep.

In the morning I found out that my access was cut off after uploading 4.95GB of data due to “suspicious activity”.

I went through the dance to reactivate the account and restarted the backup.

I will update on what happens next…

Marc

Does what happend to you sound like what’s described here?

@JonMikelV that is exactly what I got.

I am uploading again, but I am left concerned about why I was blocked.

My upload speed is capped by my ISP @ 6 mbytes/sec… I just throttled Duplicati down to 4 mbytes/sec so that I don’t overly congest the household experience for those that are home during the day. I don’t see where I am in violation of the “code of conduct”.

Has this happened to you before, and if so, how often?

Thanks!

Marc

This hasn’t happend to me before, but then I’ve not used OneDrive as a Duplicati destination.

My GUESS is that the issue is solely due to the high load on such as new account.

I throttled duplicati to 500kbytes/sec (4mbits/sec) and left it running. I’m now up to 17.6GB uploaded without a problem.

I did the throttle so that the upload would not cause problems for family members who were home during the day. I’ll lift the throttle limit before we go to bed tonight and see what things look like in the morning.

Marc

Sounds like a nice plan - good luck!

A quick update. I removed the throttle and I have been uploading at ~6mbits/sec for over 24 hours without a problem.

I can’t be certain why I was flagged for suspicious activity after the first 4.95GB of uploaded data, but I suspect it has something to do with it being a new account.

I have noticed that there is a long delay (10’s of minutes) between the time an account is registered as a paid account and onedrive.com showing that you have access to your full 1TB.

I started the upload after I made my payment but while onedrive.com was still showing that my account was a “free” account, which I thought was limited to 15GB but I now see the limit on free accounts is 5GB.

Perhaps filling the 5GB simply triggered the wrong error (“Suspended for suspicious activity” vs. "over your limit.)

Maybe this problem would not have happened if I had waited for it to recognize that I had upgraded to a paid, 1TB account.

In any event, I am up to 50GB of data backed up and the upload speed is only limited by my upload bandwidth – not anything MSFT is doing.

I will post an update once things finish.

Marc

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Works fine for me. No issues in uploading but I’ve been using OneDrive/365 for some time.