Guides / Backup

Automatic Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, Without a Computer Running

Cloud-to-cloud backup copies your files from one provider to another on a schedule, without either of them ever touching your computer.

Why not just use a desktop backup tool

Desktop tools work by downloading everything to your machine and uploading it somewhere else. For a few gigabytes that is fine. For 500 GB it means 500 GB down and 500 GB up over your home connection, with the computer awake for the duration, and a partial run every time the laptop sleeps.

Server-side backup does not involve your device at all. The transfer happens between the two providers on our infrastructure. Start it and close the lid.

How a run actually works

Each run compares the two sides rather than copying blindly. It walks the source tree and the destination tree, matches them by path and name, compares hashes where both providers expose a comparable one, and copies only what is missing or different.

That is why the first run is the slow one and the rest are quick. The first copies everything; a later run on an unchanged drive finds nothing to do and finishes having transferred zero bytes.

Nothing in your backup is ever overwritten or deleted. A file that changes at the source is copied alongside the old one as "photo (backup 2026-08-25).jpg", so the previous version is still there. Deleting a file from the source does not delete it from the backup.

Choosing a schedule

Weekly suits most people. Daily makes sense for working folders that change constantly — active projects, client work, anything you would be annoyed to lose a day of. Monthly is enough for an archive that rarely moves.

Frequency costs nothing in bytes, because an unchanged file is never re-copied. What it costs is a full listing of both trees on every run, so pick the interval that matches how often the folder actually changes.

Which providers

Cloud Combo backs up between Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloud, and any WebDAV storage — Nextcloud, ownCloud, a Synology NAS, Koofr.

The useful pairs are the ones that put real distance between the copies: a different company, a different login, ideally a different jurisdiction. Backing Google Drive up to a second Google account protects you from deleting a file. It does not protect you from losing the account.

Common questions

Does my computer need to stay on?

No. Backups run on our servers, between the two providers. Nothing is downloaded to your device and nothing needs to stay awake — that is the main practical difference from a desktop backup tool.

How long does the first backup take?

It depends far more on the number of files than their size, because each file is a separate request at both ends and providers rate-limit. A few thousand files usually finishes in hours. Hundreds of thousands can run for days, unattended.

What happens if a run fails halfway?

Nothing is lost, and nothing is repeated unnecessarily. The next run compares both sides again, sees exactly what is missing, and copies that. A backup interrupted at 60% resumes as a backup that has 40% left to do.

Will it duplicate files I already have?

No. Files that already exist at the destination with a matching size and hash are skipped. Only genuinely changed files are copied again, and those arrive as dated copies rather than replacing anything.

Set it up once

Scheduled, append-only, checksum-verified. The file manager is free; the Backup Plan is $89 a year for unlimited routes.

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