Cloud Storage vs Online Backup: What’s The Difference

The Difference

I curated my own list of pricing plans of cloud storage and online backup services.

Cloud storage solution:

The vital purpose of cloud storage is to supplement your hard drive. Cloud storage is an extension of the physical storage capability of your device
Sync: cloud storage feature that lets you edit a file on one device and have those edits reflected on another device in near real-time
Share: the ability to let others view, edit or download files you’ve uploaded to your cloud storage space
Cloud storage solutions are not really suitable for hard-drive backup since they don’t retain your file-system structure because you end up having to put everything into a sync folder.

Online backup services:

Aim to replicate your hard drive, for disaster recovery.
Retain your file system structure and let you restore everything back the way it was in case you need to rebuild your hard drive

Another funny written marketing piece from Backblaze comparing their backup solution vs other sync services, might give the reason to consider to buy their subscription

A summary table of 3 best Online Backup services by Wirecutter

	Backblaze	IDrive	Arq Premium
Price (per year)	$70	$80	$60
Amount of storage	Unlimited	5 TB	1 TB
Number of computers	One	Unlimited	Five
File versioning	Unlimited	30	Unlimited
Deduplication	Yes	Yes	Yes
Backup from external drive	Yes	Yes	Yes
Backup from mapped drive	No	Yes	Yes
File restore	From web browser	In software	In software
File size limits	No	No	No
File sharing	Yes	Yes	No
File syncing	No	Yes	No

Multi-cloud management app

Spacedrive

Spacedrive is a FREE app that allows you to manage files across all devices, drives and clouds at once.

Spacedrive consolidates files and the metadata associated with them. If you have external hard drives, cloud accounts and more than one device—you'll get a birds eye view of every file you own. With the ability to create folders, tags and albums that contain files from all different locations.

Spacedrive is not a storage provider. Spacedrive is simply a database that exists on top of existing storage layers, from cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud to physical devices and external drives you already own. It doesn't provide you more storage, rather a supercharged view of your existing storage.

CloudMounter

CloudMounter is a multi-cloud management service that lets you mount your cloud services to your computer in the form of local hard drives. This way, you can upload, download and otherwise manage these cloud files directly from your computer without having them take up any space on your physical hard drive.

CloudMounter has a free version, as well as a free trial for the paid version.

Pricing:

Lifetime Personal License (1 Mac) is USD 45

NB: version provided by MacLife

Mountain Duck

Mountain Duck lets you mount server and cloud storage as a disk in Finder on macOS and the File Explorer on Windows. Open remote files with any application and work like on a local volume.

Pricing:

Mountain Duck is licensed on a per-seat basis. You have to buy a license for everyone who wants to use the software. One license can be used on any number of computers as long as it is the same user accessing the software
The license is valid for one specific major version. For future major versions, we provide upgrade discounts between 40% and 100% depending on the date of purchase
License for 1 user is USD 39

Features: