The Relica Cloud

The Relica Cloud is a reliable, highly-available remote backup destination. Simply choose "Relica Cloud" as a destination for your backups to use it.

Our cloud consists of multiple, independent providers spread across several regions. When you make a backup, you can choose up to 5 providers to back up to. By default, we recommend backing up to 2 providers: it offers a good balance of availability and price for most customers.

There are several other backup programs that let you back up to the cloud, and some which even let you back up to multiple cloud services. Ours is different for a few reasons:

• Multiple clouds. Many consumer-grade backup services have a single, managed cloud offering. Although easy enough for the standard computer user, this puts all your eggs in one basket, so to speak: if their cloud services goes down, are discontinued (several have before and do still), or if you lose access to your account, your cloud backups are lost. Relica offers several cloud providers to back up to just as easily as one.
• Fully managed cloud. Other backup programs that let you back up to multiple cloud services require you to know how to set up your own cloud storage accounts, make credentials, configure the program with those credentials, and manage the storage over the lifetime of your backups in order to preserve them. Relica bundles this all up for you: we allocate space in the cloud for your account, manage the credentials, and perform regular health checks automatically so you don't have to.
• One upload. Relica is the only backup service that makes up to 5 copies of your data in the cloud with only a single upload from your computer, resulting in backups up to 5x faster and cheaper than other programs.
• Easy enough for the average computer user. Because our cloud is fully managed and Relica is offered to consumers, it's easy enough for non-technical computer users to use. You don't have to be a programmer or IT professional to know how to take advantage of our unique technology.

Pricing

The Relica Cloud is priced based on how many providers you choose to back up to:

• First provider: $10/TB/mo.
• Second-fifth providers: $15/TB/provider/mo.
• Minimum: $1/mo.

Unlike file sync or backup services like Dropbox, Google Drive, iDrive, and others, there are no pricing tiers: you only pay for what you use. So backing up 25 GB with Relica to 5 cloud providers will cost you $1.75/mo. instead of, say, $8.25 to a single cloud with Dropbox Plus. (Note that Relica is backup archival software, not a replacement for file sync—we're only using this as a pricing example.)

The minimum is applied only if you select Relica Cloud as a backup destination. If you do not back up anything to the Relica Cloud, there is no monthly minimum. (Most people use well beyond the minimum anyway, since it's only 100 GB to 1 provider or 40 GB to 2 providers.)

Here's the cost of a hypothetical 250 GB backed up to the Relica Cloud:

• 250 GB, 1 provider: $2.50/mo.
• 250 GB, 2 providers: $6.25/mo.
• 250 GB, 3 providers: $10/mo.
• 250 GB, 4 providers: $13.75/mo.
• 250 GB, 5 providers: $17.50/mo.

See our pricing page for more information and a cost estimator.

Number of Providers

The number of providers is an important setting you should carefully consider, especially if you are backing up highly critical data and/or need restores available immediately.

Changes to the number of cloud providers can be made in your Relica control panel. The number of cloud providers can be increased at any time (except for when a previous operation to expand or reduce your cloud providers is still taking place). Currently, the count can only be decreased at least 5 weeks after the last increase. This helps to keep costs, and thus our prices, low while still being a sustainable model to ensure the longevity of your backups.

The "cloud count" is set per-account, not per-backup. This keeps things simple and easy to understand, while also being less technically complex and thus more reliable.

Professionals or businesses who are backing up critical data will wish to raise the cloud count closer to 5; whereas for individuals backing up their digital lives, we recommend a count of 2 for a good balance of cost and availability. Those who are on a tight budget may use a count of just 1. In that case, we especially recommend backing up elsewhere too, such as a friend's computer. (You can do that with Relica!)

Restore Availability

The ability to restore files on-demand in failure scenarios increases dramatically as the number of cloud providers increases. (It is not uncommon for even the leading industry cloud providers to have large outages every so often.)

Although Relica is not a "cloud drive" or "file sync" service, files in the Relica Cloud (or in any backup destination) are able to be restored on-demand, by selecting which files to download and then initiating the restore. There is no waiting period except for network latency.