which cloud solution?

Introduction

I've experimented with the four major cloud solutions:

• Dropbox
• Google drive
• iCloud files feature
• OneDrive

I prefer Dropbox because it has a good undelete history.

I also use ownCloud, because then I feel safe in that I know where my files are.

Main feature choices

All of them allow automatic file upload, and particularly the desktop/documents/downloads folders can be automatically backed up, as well as your pictures.

The main advantage to google drive and onedrive in particular are they let you edit documents online. Dropbox does as well, but I don't know anyone who uses it.

Warnings

I've had bad experiences with iCloud. Like all of the solutions, it offers an option to upload and store files in the cloud and clear them off your drive, leaving a link instead, which when you click it, downloads the file to your machine.

Dropbox offers you this feature when you install it (these days).

I recommend against doing this. The reason is when you backup your primary drive, e.g. to an external hard drive, the backup will no longer contain the original real document, but the linkfile. If you restore from that backup, it will mark that linkfile as NEWER, and therefore upload it to iCloud/Dropbox, and thereby destroy the original file entirely (overwrite the complete file online).

In my own case, I had this happen (upload of links), which destroyed about 30 000 photos that I had in iCloud. I had to manually undelete them on Dropbox to get them back; fortunately they had not been deleted on Dropbox long enough for me to have lost them.

If however you are never backing up to an external hard drive, the question then becomes the matter of bandwidth cost. If you are not in an area with good connectivity OR your connectivity is expensive, I'd say do not do this either. 

The other trouble with iCloud drive is it hides your actual cloud drive folder somewhere obscure: 

/Users/username/Library/Mobile Documents

for app saved files in iOS and

/Users/username/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

for other saved files like your desktop.

How to automate more thorough/complete backups

Generally you want to back up more than just your documents, downloads, desktop and pictures folder. You might want to for example backup your music folder, or your email.

On a mac, the easiest way to do this is to move everything into your dropbox folder and then store linkfiles of them outside of dropbox.

Let's assume you have the following folders:

• Desktop
• Documents
• Downloads
• Library
• Pictures
• Movies
• Music 
• Pictures
• Public

First, move them all to the dropbox folder:

open the terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)

type:

cd ~username [where username is your login name, e.g. john]

mv * Dropbox

It will give an error saying you can't move dropbox into dropbox. Ignore that.

Move the Library folder back. (You don't want to back up caches etc., because that will generate way too much network traffic.)

mv Dropbox/Library .

But suppose you want to backup your email folders:

then type:

ln -s /Users/username/Dropbox/Library/Mail /Users/username/Dropbox/Library/Mail

Dropbox will now backup your mailfiles.

If you are on Gmail, I would not bother doing this as Gmail does their own backups.

You probably also want to backup your keychain:

ln -s /Users/username/Dropbox/Library/Keychains /Users/username/Dropbox/Library/Keychains

But you are not done, because you will need to recreate your desktop and documents and downloads etc., etc., before the operating system notices and recreates them.

So:

for i in `/bin/ls ~username/Dropbox/` ; do ( ln -s /Users/username/Dropbox/$i  /Users/username/$i ; chown username:staff /Users/usersname/$i ) ; done

That basically goes into the dropbox folder, and makes linkfiles of everything in there, to the folder outside of that (your home folder). Note that ` are backticks or grave accents, the key next to Z. Note also that the above command must be typed in one line with no return characters inside it (don't press enter until you typed the entire thing).

What will happen now is any change you make in your normal folders - documents, downloads, pictures, music, et.c. will automatically go to dropbox as it happens. 

WARNING. This will generate quite a lot of network traffic. You might want to exclude the Movies and Music folder unless you don't have a subscription to iTunes or similar.