
This arrangement is like storing your files at your regular house and your vacation home, as well as at your friend’s house.

Cloud storage on its own tends to be the cheapest of these three options but doesn’t include fancier features like syncing, file sharing, or automated backups.

With cloud storage, you have to manually move your files to the cloud drive, and you can access them only through the internet. Think of it as putting your files on a storage drive at a friend’s house (your friend in this instance is a corporation).

During setup, Arq Premium encourages (but doesn’t require) you to use a private encryption key for a secure backup. The Arq Premium software gives you a lot of control over how your backup works, including options to choose how long to keep files around, to select any external drives, and more. Arq Premium supports up to five computers, and if you need more than the included 1 TB of storage, it’s an additional $0.00599 per gigabyte each month (which amounts to about $6 per terabyte each month, making it more expensive than Backblaze and IDrive for data hoarders).

If you like to configure software to meet your specific needs, Arq Premium, available for Windows and Mac, offers far more customization options than Backblaze or IDrive and costs less than both for 1 TB of storage.
