4 Free Ways to Backup Entire Hard Drive to Cloud
Don’t know how to backup entire hard drive to cloud? Here are the 4 ways and detailed steps listed below, please keep reading.
Any way to backup the whole hard disk to cloud?
How to backup everything on hard drive to cloud?
I am looking for a solution to protect my hard drive files, I just find my 1TB external hard drive failed and all my backups get lost, it’s frustrating. How to make my backups safe or is there any way to backup hard drive to cloud? Please help.
As a matter of fact, your data will be safe if you comply with the 3-2-1 backup strategy, that is creating at least three copies of your data, and saving two backup copies on different storage media, keeping one of them offsite. As for online hard drive backup, just try the following effective solutions to backup entire hard drive to cloud easily.
Best Free Way to Backup Entire Hard drive to Cloud
In this part, we will work you through the detailed steps to backup HDD to cloud, let’s get started. To safeguard your critical data on your hard drive, it’s strongly recommended to try the free cloud backup service CBackup, which allows you to back up the whole hard drive, even multiple hard drives to cloud, like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. The data is stored on your own cloud, it’s quite safe.
Here is how to backup hard drive to cloud with detailed instructions (we will take backup hard drive to OneDrive as an example).
1. Please download CBackup desktop app and sign up for free, then sign in.
2. Click the Storage tab on the left side, choose OneDrive and click Authorize Now. Then follow the on-screen guide to complete the authority and the OneDrive information.
3. Hit Backup > Backup PC to Public Cloud to create a new cloud HDD backup.
4. Rename the Task Name if required, select the entire hard drive as the backup source, and click OneDrive as the backup destination. Press the Start Backup button to backup hard drive to OneDrive easily and automatically.
- ★Tips:
- If you want to backup multiple hard drives to cloud, just select the whole computer that contains the multiple hard drives while selecting the source.
- You could set up the backup settings with Settings (on the bottom left), like create a schedule backup with Scheduler (on daily, weekly, or monthly basis), configure to send the email about the backup process, or even exclude or include the file types as you like to save your cloud storage space.
Now, your hard drive files, including system files, partitions, installed programs, personal settings, and files, have been backed up to cloud. Of course, you could use it to backup hard drive to Google Drive, Dropbox and other clouds as well.
What’s more, CBackup has other useful features that could help your cloud data protection:
- ★Tips:
- Cloud to cloud backup, which takes a backup of one cloud to another to prevent data loss.
- Sync one cloud to another helps you switch cloud drives with everything transferred, and there is no need to download and re-upload.
- Combine multiple cloud drives, even different cloud platforms, to form a huge free cloud storage space, then backup files to that space.
- 5GB free cloud storage of CBackup Cloud. And you could upgrade to get more, like 1TB (1024GB) and 5TB (5120GB).
Backup hard drive to Google Drive
Google Drive provides the biggest free cloud storage space on the cloud market, which is 15GB. Therefore, if you have a Google Drive account, not matter personal or business account, you can't backup entire hard drive to cloud, because Google Drive does not provide you the backup feature only the sync feature.
So, here we will show you how to sync hard drive files to Google Drive. Please guarantee that Google Drive has enough storage space to store the entire hard drive data.
You have 2 ways to sync hard drive to Google Drive, One is manually to upload files and folders on your hard drive to your Google Drive account with Google Drive website, that’s not the recommended way. Another is to download Google Drive for desktop, and then use the app to upload hard drive files.
Now, we choose the easy way, which is upload hard drive files to Google Drive via Drive for desktop, and here are the steps:
1. Please download and install Google Drive for desktop, then configure Google Drive settings.
2. Move all files and folders into one folder that located at the hard drive.
3. Click Add folder in the My Computer tab while configuring Google Drive for desktop app, then choose the folder containing all files on your hard drive to backup.
3. Choose Sync with Google Drive > Done > Save. Then your entire hard drive files have been backed up to your Google Drive.
After downloading Google Drive for desktop, your computer will inform a Google Drive disk and you could change to show a Google Drive streaming folder located at C:/User/(your username)/Google Drive Streaming by default, and you could move the hard drive files and folders to that Google Drive folder to move data from hard drive to Google Drive. As you can see, All of them are manual way and it’s not easy to sync the entire hard drive data to cloud.
Sync Hard Drive Files to OneDrive
OneDrive offers you free 5GB cloud storage space, if you need more cloud storage space, please choose a subscription plan of OneDrive plans or combine cloud drives into one and you can fully use all the idle cloud space and then upload hard drive files to OneDrive manually:
To backup hard drive to OneDrive, you can only move files on the hard drive to OneDrive folder manually, and here are the steps.
1. Install the OneDrive desktop app, and it will automatically create a OneDrive folder on your computer.
2. Then connect your external hard drive to the computer If you want to sync external hard drive to OneDrive.
3. Move all the hard drive files to OneDrive folder, then it will automatically sync hard drive files to OneDrive. Or right click the hard drive file and choose Move to OneDrive (then you have repeat the process to sync all hard drive files to OneDrive).
Although OneDrive provides backup features, however, this backup feature only available for the Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders backup to OneDrive, nothing else. You could try the following steps:
1. You could click the OneDrive icon on the system tray, then select the Help & Settings icon > Settings, then hit Manage backup button behind the Back up important PC folders to OneDrive under Sync and backup section.
2. Then choose the Desktop, Documents or Pictures to backup to OneDrive automatically.
Upload Hard Drive Files to Dropbox
Of course, there is another popular cloud drive, which is Dropbox. And Dropbox only provides 2GB free cloud storage, that maybe not be enough for your cloud backup needs.
Obviously, Dropbox provides the backup features only for Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders to Dropbox, and it will automatically back them up to Dropbox.
Here it is to backup Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders to Dropbox via the Dropbox desktop app:
1. Please install the Dropbox desktop app, then sign in to your Dropbox account.
2. Click your avatar icon > Preferences > Backups, then click Set up under This PC section.
3. Tick your desktop, documents, and downloads folder, or hit Add folders to add other folders that you would like to backup to Dropbox.
If you would like to sync hard drive to Dropbox, try the following:
1. Please open your Dropbox folder, and connect your hard drive if needed.
2. Move all the hard drive files and folders to the Dropbox folder, then it will be synced to the Dropbox cloud.
The Epilogue
Compared with Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive, CBackup is the best way to backup entire hard drive to cloud, just follow the above instructions to get hard drive to be backed up. If your cloud storage space is not enough, you could also use CBackup to combine cloud storage space into a large backup space, even unlimited free cloud storage space.
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