Want to make sure you have a backup of all your critical files? Found a few excellent backup/sync tools for both Windows and Linux. Many also support MAC, Android and IOS

Adrive

Not a free storage but at $25/year for 100GB a great value. Includes many connection methods such as FTP, scp, fully featured rsync, WebDAV. Max file size of 16GB. Same price as GoDaddy’s onlinestorage but many more features. Have had some issues with support not responding (no phone access just email).

For Linux, sshfs, which was found to be much faster than webDAV.

Desktop client is available for Windows , IOS, Android etc.

See all the features here.

Linux sshfs

If you want to mount via /etc/fstab:

@sftp.adrive.com:/home/ /media/adrive fuse.sshfs defaults,noauto,_netdev,reconnect,allow_other,user,uid=,gid=,umask=117 0 0

noauto: Don’t mount automatically but manually (e.g. ‘mount’ command or file-manager)
_netdev: Wait for network connectiviy (Important! Boot halts if no network connectivity when using ‘auto’)
reconnect: Automatically reconnect on broken network connectivity
allow_other: Allow other users than root
user: Only allow to (un)mount share
uid=: Local user who can access share
gid=: Local group who can access share
umask=117: Create new files with read and write permission for user and group but no execution permission and no permissions for others

Google Drive

Google drive provides 15GB of free storage (shared with your email account). Current price for 100GB is around $20/yr.

Google does not supply any Linux client but the file sync utility rclone does a great job. rclone also allows to to mount your google drive (experimental)

IDrive

This one is $60/yr for 1TB space plus another 1TB sync space. The Windows client is robust and allows backup of multiple folders. The Linux client not very robust. For Linux you can use their command line client idevsutil but requires some scripting to get it to work. The sync area is only of use with Windows clients.

Its a backup client not a sync client so unneeded files have to be manually removed from your cloud space.

Compared to Adrive its lacking ssh, scp, rsync abilities.

 

Mega

Mega provides 50GB free space with no file size limits.  They have clients for Windows and Linux. The Linux client is GUI based so won’t work headless.

The file sync utility rclone does a great job. rclone also allows to to mount your mega drive (experimental).

4Shared

4shared provides 15GB free space.  2GB file size limit. They have multiple clients and also support WEBDAV so you can mount you files as a Windows drive or Linux directory.

Symbolic links are not supported.

hubiC

hubic provides 25 GB of free storage with no file size limits. Clients for Windows, Linux, IOS etc. It currently only allows syncing of one folder.

Under Linux you can get creative by creating symbolic links to other directories under your sync folder.

Requires the mono libraries. If you install it from the .deb files, you can then cause the dependencies to be installed by  using “apt-get -f install”.

Doesn’t provide WEBDAV support, but can be mounted in linux, see https://github.com/TurboGit/hubicfuse

An excellent tool rclone is available to copy/sync your files to Hubic (and a number of other providers). See http://rclone.org/

pCloud

pCloud provides 10GB free with no limit on file size. Their native client only works with one directory. Under Linux the file sync utility rclone does a great job. rclone also allows to to mount your  drive (experimental)

Current price for 500GB is $48/yr.

Their concept is to keep that one directory in sync with all devices using the same account.

Under Linux, your account can be mounted. See https://github.com/pcloudcom/pfs

Automatic Updates

If you are running a Linux system and you are not using the built in synchronization of these tools (using customized shell scripts) , you’ll want to look into inotify and incron. These tools will allow you to monitor for changes and invoke a script to backup the changes. incron can’t do recursive directories. inotifywait can be used in a shell script, but only executes on a single directory. Have a look at https://github.com/splitbrain/Watcher for a python script that handles multiple directories recursively.

Limitations with some Solutions

Some solutions require the use of  only folders in your HOME or a specific location. I prefer to keep photos, home videos etc. on a physical drive other than the boot drive.

To get around this, one could have the entire home filesystem mounted on another drive and place all your files in your home.

You may be able to create symbolic links within such a location. If this fails to work, another method is to make a bind mount of an external folder to a folder within your home or specific location.

You can do this with the following command:

mkdir /home/yourhome/LogicalDir

sudo mount –bind /PhysicalDir /home/yourhome/LogicalDir

You’ll want to make this permanent across reboots or the Ubuntu sync process will remove all your files from the cloud storage.

This can be done in /etc/fstab by adding:

/PhysicalDir /home/yourhome/LogicalDir none rw,bind 0 0