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!

Hi! You seem knowledgeable about this stuff, so if you can answer a question. I have an older Jackery power station that has a single USB-C PD port. I need more when camping and I have been plugging a AC USB-C charger into one of the AC ports on the power station. From what you wrote that make me think that is not an efficient way due to the conversion from DC to AC to DC. Would I be better off using the DC “Car Charger” port or maybe a USB-C hub of some sort?