Cloud support

Can this software store backups at a remote location?

Rsync doesn’t have any specific network backup features, but it could, theoretically, make use of a networked resource (such as an SMB share) as the destination folder, but that could be said of practically any backup software, so it’s a bit of a stretch.

All the software suffered from limited cloud support compared to what the underlying backup software is capable of. Deja Dup has reduced its cloud support over the years and now only supports Google Drive. We tried that out and it worked properly, and it was straightforward to set up.

Vorta can make local backups or back up onto a Borg server. It’s perfectly possible to host your own Borg backup server, but you need some technical know-how to accomplish this. BorgBase (www.borgbase.com) offers online hosting with a small (10GB) free option and affordable looking larger options.

BackupPC works differently to the other solutions because it’s a server that is accessed via a web interface. It can run locally, but in most cases it fetches the files to be backed up via wellsupported networking standards such as SSH, Samba or rsync. So, although it has no cloud support as such, it’s already in the cloud, in a sense.

Back In Time can use SSH to back up on to a remote server without having to install a specialised client on the remote machine. It accomplishes this by running rsync on that server. For example, many NASes offer this facility, or you could use a computer that has an SSH server and rsync such as a Raspberry Pi. We tested backing up over SSH and it worked fine, including browsing the snapshot within the interface.