What's the best way to backup OneDrive?

You'd have to check with the seller or manufacturer of the NAS to see if it can be used with OneDrive.  There is nothing wrong with a NAS except that it is vulnerable to theft and fire like are all devices.   OneDrive is also vulnerable to being locked out of your account. 

Periodic backups stored away and not synced to OneDrive are the best bet.  Local copies of files are the safest and more secure way to go in my opinion and you use less bandwidth.

I don't have any specific NAS right now.  I was seeking suggestions for one to buy that will do what I'm asking.  

So yeah, "Local copies of files are the safest and more secure way to go and you use less bandwidth."  This also makes it a lot more difficult to gain access to your data from many different devices.

OneDrive solves that problem and more, but it leaves us vulnerable to being locked out of the account as you said. 

What I'm envisioning is a NAS with OneDrive client installed that pulls all data from OneDrive into a drive on the NAS.  Then from there it would have incremental backups of the first drive in separate drives within the NAS unit.

So in theory, if disaster ever happened with my NAS unit I'd still have all my data in OneDrive. If I something ever happened to my OneDrive account I'd still have all my data on the NAS.  The odds of something happening to both at the same time would be very slim, but I could still utilize Carbonite or any other general remote backup service as another layer.

I guess I'm just a bit surprised I'm having such a hard time finding such a storage device.

If I'm understanding correctly that you keep your files all on the hard drive on the desktop PC, then I'd look into an incremental File backup using Macrium. It is no longer free but, as with it's drive imaging, it is the best:

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/B...

If not you could use free File History, but make sure to be careful if you ever use it to transfer files to a new PC that you copy the backup first, and assure it doesn't overwrite the backup because it thinks you're setting it up new instead of restoring. I've seen this happen enough it should be a deal killer for using it (and inexcusable they never cared enough to fix that) unless you are prepared:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-cor...

https://www.howtogeek.com/74623/how-to-use-the-...

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-work-file-h...

Let me know if these meet your needs.

Thanks for the reply and the details.  

I'm not sure I'm entirely clear, though.  This doesn't seem to solve the problem I would be facing unless I'm misunderstanding somewhere.

On my desktop machine I have a 2TB drive that is used as my OneDrive storage.  I have updated my user folders to point into OneDrive like you described in your guide, and this works great for keeping files backed up to OneDrive in general.

All of that data is now in OneDrive, and I use my laptop as my primary workstation now, but it only has a 1TB drive.  This is fine in general, because I don't need all of the OneDrive data on this drive all the time, which is one of the nice things about OneDrive.

However, that makes your statement here a problem for me:

In addition to have a wholistic backup method I keep an external drive backup where I drag the User folders periodically, after having seen enough cases in forums where files using a backup program are lost unnecessarily when you can just drag they latest set of User folders over.

In order for me to "drag the user folders" to an external drive all of those files would have to be downloaded to the device.  I don't even have enough space on this device to do that, though, and that would defeat the benefit of not having to store everything on every device.

So my desktop machine now is sort of doing what you say, I guess.  Again, I have it configured to "always keep on this device" for everything, and then that storage drive is mirrored to another drive each day.

This just seems like a silly reason to keep a desktop computer around doing nothing but that, and it also doesn't give me an incremental backup.  As you mentioned, if something gets deleted on OneDrive and then that syncs to my desktop storage and mirrored drives, it would be gone (unless the recycle bin saves me.)

I guess what I was hoping to find some some sort of a network attached storage drive that was 2TB or maybe 3TB that would let you login to OneDrive and configure itself as "always keep on this device" so that it would do essentially what my desktop computer is doing right now.  Nothing like that available?

Hi Drew. I'm Greg, an installation specialist, 10 years awarded Windows MVP, and Volunteer Moderator, here to help you.

So I've used OneDrive to fully sync and back up all of my User folders by this method for ten years:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki.... My Office 365 includes 1tb OneDrive storage.

Then because Google Drive is generous with 15gb free, I back up my most important User folders also to Google Drive backup which makes it easy to back them up with a few clicks. More on Google Drive backup here:

https://www.blog.google/products/photos/introdu...

https://www.google.com/drive/download/backup-an...

It's rare any files get lost, especially because OneDrive protects them by never deleting anything in the online Recycle Bin until you authorize it. But a few times Google Drive has saved my bacon on a file that did disappear elsewhere. So I wouldn't do without both enabled at all times. No conflicts, no real problems.

In addition to have a wholistic backup method I keep an external drive backup where I drag the User folders periodically, after having seen enough cases in forums where files using a backup program are lost unnecessarily when you can just drag they latest set of User folders over.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask back any questions and keep me posted. If you'll wait to rate whether my post resolved your problem, I will keep working with you until it's resolved.

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