panicnow

These seem like semantics to me. Saying it isn’t a backup, when it successfully restored my uncle’s 25 years of files after his hard drive failed, doesn’t ring true to me. OneDrive allows recovery of data from ransomware, common user error like deleting or overwriting files, drive failure and catastrophe like fire. What use cases does this backup methodology lack for you that is important for casual end users?

Personally, I architected datacenter backups for a large company with business critical data. This was a decade ago, but even then I was responsible for architecting logical, physical, application, database, snapshot, tape and site replication for about a petabyte of data (hard drives used to be small). When you say that some of those things are not backup, I don’t understand why you think that? Different types of backups have different strengths, weaknesses and use cases.

You can roll your onedrive back to a previous point in time in the event of a ransomware, technical issue or user mistake that causes issue.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restore-your-onedrive-fa231298-759d-41cf-bcd0-25ac53eb8a15

OneDrive does not do full disk synchronization to my knowledge.

OneDrive is a decent solution for non-techies who need a backup system. I’ve installed it for octogenarians who certainly would never backup anything on their own. It does versioning on the files, so it can protect against ransomware and provide fallback to earlier versions.

Whenever I am remotely helping one of the people I have it setup for, I glance at the icon to see if it is working. Occasionally, I see it complaining about a single file not syncing for some reason, but that generally will resolve itself by the next time I check.

It has a vault that requires additional authentication for your most sensitive files.

I like it—I’m sure its not perfect, but it isn’t terrible.

It’s such a game changer!

I had the pleasure of working with 8” floppy drives with the Social Security Administration.

I hate that they renamed it on iOS but not Mac. Now my fingers can’t remember just one thing.

This work between certain states. For instance, you can drive into Oregon and shop with no sales tax then return to California or Washington with your goods.

Liquor is also much cheaper in some states than others—you can really stock up if you are already driving through a state.

My personal choices are slightly different than yours, but I appreciate your comment. You’re clearly an ally while not being a clone. I often tire of discussions about security and privacy—mainly because I am very pragmatic.

Unlike OP I don’t use Proton’s suite, but considered it. Most of what I want Apple provides (Advanced Data Protection, Private Relay, etc) in a form that meets my minimum requirements. Other things that I use (Signal especially) are well-supported on iPhone.

I’ll talk down Apple all day long in the correct context, but I still believe it is a good choice today. I may re-evaluate at some point in the future when the landscape or my needs change. For now I am very happy.

After coming from Apollo and Reddit, at first I was just unhappy that the clients were not great. Once I moved past my grief state I realized Voyager was good enough. I’ve stopped re-evaluating (though I’m sure I will again at some point) and just appreciate what I have.

My 86 year old father-in-law has had the roughest time with the new outlook. It keeps losing his settings. I kept him on the (old) outlook as long as possible.

I tried Thunderbird for him, but some parts of the UI don’t respect extremely large fonts. Sigh.

My current solution is just straight up web mail to his provider which has other problems, but I have sorta-kinda mitigated them by installing a separate browser that is set to open that website. This has some other small problems, but it will have to do for now.

I honestly wish Apple made a 20” iPad.

You absolutely can roll back to previous versions using the steps in those links. I believe it has a 30 day limit, but that is pretty good for a consumer product.

OneDrive does offer restoration of individual file versions or even the entire OneDrive contents (for things like ransomware attacks). Details are here

I think OneDrive is a pretty good (but paid) backup utility especially for non-technical people. There are a lot of things that I could nitpick on, but for some of the older people (octogenarians) that I am the family support for, I set it up and anytime I interact with their computer I click on OneDrive to ensure it is replicating. I very occasionally have seen a single file not replicating, but never have I seen it fail completely. These people previous had NO backups of any kind.

I use it myself as an additional backup location, but not in the way most people would.