How long does the first cloud backup take?
The short answer
Plan on days rather than hours. The first backup uploads everything, and your home upload speed sets the pace. At a typical 30 Mbps upload, 500 GB takes roughly two days of continuous running. IDrive can ship you a physical drive to skip the wait. After the first pass, only changes upload.
In detail
Your upload speed sets the pace more than the backup service does. Divide your data by your connection’s upload rate to see how long it takes. That is the smaller number in a speed test. 500 GB at 30 Mbps is around 37 hours of full-speed uploading. A 2 TB photo archive on the same line takes closer to a week. Backup apps also slow themselves down by default so your video calls keep working. That stretches the time a little further.
Make it easy rather than fast. Start the backup before a weekend away and let it run overnight for as long as it needs. The apps pick up again automatically. Look for a "performance" slider in the settings if you want to give the backup more bandwidth. The real shortcut is a physical drive. IDrive Express mails you a drive. You copy your data onto it and mail it back. Your first backup then travels at parcel speed instead of DSL speed. On most plans this is free once a year.
The good news is that this happens only once. After the first pass, backup apps upload only new and changed files. For normal use that is a few minutes of background traffic a day. The first week asks for some patience. After that you hardly notice the backup running.